The ARM team have just come back from another successful Embedded World. For those who aren’t familiar, Embedded World is the biggest embedded trade show, attracting exhibitors and visitors from across the embedded industry, and hosted in Nuremberg, Germany.
The event spans 5 halls and hence visitors can soon clock up the miles – an ARM partner mentioned that his (ARM Cortex-M3 powered) Fitbit showed he had walked 13 miles in one day!
Not surprisingly the theme of the event was the Internet of Things, and although there were lots of IoT related products being shown, there was so much more. There were so many ARM related products at the show it is difficult to do them justice, however a few things that I saw generate a lot of interest included Xilinx’s newly announced Zync Ultrascale+ MPSoC which sports an impressive quad Cortex-A53, dual Cortex-R5, Mali-400 and an FPGA, all at 16nm; Freescale’s Cortex-M7 based Kinetis KV5x MCU family; and Microchip's new family of Cortex-M0+ devices focused on the automotive segment which was announced at the show.
It was great to see a range of Cortex-M7 demos : STMicroelectronics showed their STM32F7 family of MCUs in smart home gateway, wearable, and audio DSP processing applications. Atmel showed their SAM S70/E70 demonstrating a 4x DSP performance increase over SAM4. For anybody who missed the announcement at Techcon 2014, the Cortex-M7 offers the highest performance in the Cortex-M4 family, achieving 5 CoreMark/MHz and typical 2x DSP performance of Cortex-M4
ARM itself generated a lot of attention with the announcement of IoT starter kits in partnership with IBM and Freescale, based on Cortex-M4 devices. It is simple to quickly send data to cloud applications and a fantastic way to get started in IoT.
Safety was a key theme in many discussions and ARM’s recent Cortex-R5 safety pack announcement and the 30% safety certified compiler performance improvements with Green Hills Software on Cortex-R5 were of particular interest.
To get a greater appreciation of some of the highlights of Embedded World 2015, checkout the ARMFlix Youtube channel.