ARM core is no bigger than grain of sand

Richard York, ARM’s director of embedded product marketing, noted: “It’s similar in size to the original ARM7, but has more performance. It’s aimed at markets where something smaller with better energy efficiency is needed.” Target markets for the core include low cost microcontrollers, analogue and mixed signal parts and logic replacement. York noted: “All these sectors demand something smaller than a Cortex-M3. We’ve been developing this core for the last year or so and have done better than we expected.” York explained that while the target was a 20k gate core, ARM’s designers believe it may be possible to produce a core in just 10k gates. “On a leading edge process,” he noted, “it really is like a grain of sand.” ARM will be launching the core with the help of two lead partners – NXP and Triad Semiconductor. Geoff Lees, general manager of NXP’s microcontroller business, noted the core would appear later this year in a low end device. “We already have test silicon in progress and will move to volume manufacture before the end of this year.” Lees pointed out that many applications are now moving beyond an 8bit mcu’s capabilities. “We don’t want to call 8 or 16bit software; we want to run minimal clock cycles, then go back to sleep.” * Meanwhile, ARM has announced that its IP cores have now shipped in 10billion processors.