AUSTIN, Texas—With an eye toward enabling next-generation mainstream mobile designs, ARM this week announced ARM Artisan physical IP, including POP™ IP, based on the new ARM Cortex-A73 processor.
Targeting TSMC’s 16FFC (FinFET Compact) process, the POP IP is a way for silicon partners to get SoC designs to market more quickly with power-efficient, high-performance implementations of Cortex-A73. The Cortex-A73 (New ARM Cortex-A73 Processor drives efficiency, performance for mobile designs), announced recently at the Computex event in Taiwan, has been designed to deliver significant increases in sustained performance and efficiency compared with the Cortex-A72.
“We want to provide the most optimized implementation solution for that particular market, in this case mainstream mobile,” said Will Abbey, general manager of ARM’s Physical Design Group. “It’s ensuring the POP is coincident with the rollouts of Cortex-A73 and the Mali-G71 graphics processor (Mali-G71: ARM's Most Powerful, Scalable and Efficient GPU to Date), so partners can accelerate their own learning curve.”
Speaking at a press briefing here at the 53rd Design Automation Conference, Abbey said ARM taped out a version of the Cortex-A73 POP IP in May, running at 2.8GHz.
“This particular tapeout was done very early, and it gives us a lot of confidence that even though it was based on early POP, the final implementation of the POP will deliver our goal of 3GHz,” Abbey told reporters.
The POP includes a reference methodology (including Synopsys- and Cadence-based reference flows) so partners have the best scripts available to ensure they can deliver that predictable result in a predictable timeframe, he said. It also includes Artisan logic and memory physical IP, a POP IP user guide and a benchmarking data sheet, Abbey (right, talking with Semico Research's Joanne Itow) said.
The POP on 16FFC for Cortex-A73 comes in two configurations, high performance and low power). Also available is POP IP for Cortex-A53 (two configurations) and the Mali-G71, Abbey said.
For the rest of the SoC, ARM offers two logic libraries (a high-performance (9T) and ultra high density(7T)) as well as a set of memory compilers (nine of them, ranging from ultra-high density to high speed, single port to dual port and two GPIO solutions, supporting both 1.8V and 3.3V options, he added.
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