I am doing my PhD in Computer engineering and have developed a processor which is similar to ARM Cortex M0. I have got the obfuscated code and tried to make the comparisons. I was wondering if anyone could give me the details on the area, speed and power of the Cortex M0. This would be of a great help. Thanks a lot in advance.
Hi,
Gate count is based on the silicon area of a layout / area of a standard NAND2 gate.
You cannot get the exact gate count by counting the logic operations in the design because synthesis process can easily change the logic structure and compound gates exist for all standard libraries. As a result, your estimation of 72000 to 100000 is completely off
Without going into details, some of the low cost Cortex-M0 microcontrollers on the market has less than 50K gates and that included bus system, peripehrals, and possibly DMA support, etc (exclude memory area and analog components). The 12K gate number is based on minimum configuration at 180ULL process. However, you can get different gate count using different processes, some gives better figure and some give larger areas. For the Cortex-M0 DesignStart, as it has got 16 interrupts and the SysTick timer, the area would be a bit larger than 12K.
If you need further help, you can contact ARM univerity programme and maybe they can give you more information.
regards,
Joseph