If you've watched any sporting event on television lately, you've seen the pressure put on referees and umpires. They have to make split-second decisions in real-time, having viewed ultra-high-speed action…
Squaring the circle - Optimizing power efficiency in a Cortex-A15 processor
It is entirely appropriate that ARM will announce technical details of its latest hard macro product, the Cortex™-A15 MP4 Hard Macro for TSMC 28HPM node at COOL Chips XV, the IEEE Symposium on Low…
Early Power, Performance, Area Analysis & AMBA Designer: A Winning Combo
Power, performance and area or "PPA," as it is called, has become a universally interesting topic to system-on-chip (SoC) designers around the world. Atrenta -- an ARM Connected Community…
Streamlining the migration to an ARM processor based platform
Now available design strategies and documentation to ease the migration to an ARM platform - From one programmer to another. You could say I'm an "Acorn boy" - I cut my programming teeth on personal computers…
Using Cache Coherency to Verify the AMBA4 Protocol
The Jasper User Group Meeting was held on November 8 & 9 and was full of presentations on the diverse ways that users are applying formal techniques — some in areas where never before thought possible…
big.LITTLE and AMBA 4 ACE keep your cache warm and avoid flushes
Updated 29th October 2013High performance and power efficiency are critical to the latest mobile devices, and AMBA® 4 ACE™ is a fundamental technology supporting ARM's big.LITTLE proces…
Simplifying SoC's with Hard Macros - New solutions for old problems
At the TSMC Open Innovation Platform (OIP) forum in San Jose this week Mike Inglis, the General Manager of the Processor Division at ARM, presented a keynote speech succinctly titled "Enabling Smart System…
Energy Efficiency and Air Conditioning - Part 1
I've recently realized just how similar mechanical and electronic engineering are when it comes to energy conservation. You see, I've recently begun construction of an energy-efficient, Frank-Lloyd Wright…
Avoiding rush hour traffic jams in your SoC design
Thank goodness for the new packetization, virtual networking and clock gating features of the ARM CoreLink NIC-400. I'm fed up with hearing about spurious comparisons between a single humungous crossbar…
Designing an ARM Based SoC: How to Meet Your Power Budget
ARM IP and ARM processor usage is pervasive across multiple segments of the electronics industry. As shown in Figure 1, each of these market segments have unique design challenges and analysis drivers…
Elba - How do we know it works?
In part 1 of this blog, I outlined the thought process behind the Elba program. Here I'll look at the implementation decisions for the project.In ARM there are various stages of maturity of a new processor…
Wouldn't it be interesting if we... - Giving Birth to "Elba"
"Wouldn't it be interesting if we....". That's the way many step changes have started in ARM. In the next four blogs I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you about just one of those, we called it…
ARM Cortex-R processor. What is it good for?
The answer is functional safety applications. At least, that's where TI's ARM® Cortex™-R cores are utilized - in high performance, real-time microcontrollers. As many real-time…
Honey, SuVolta Deeply Depleted My Cortex-M0 Power!
A wide variety of applications will be impacted by the massive trend which is broadly named as the "Internet of Things" (IoT). Even if some may consider this term as being overused, and newer marketing…
The Atmel SAM D20 family - The inside story
A couple of weeks ago Atmel launched the SAM D20 family of products with a comprehensive roll-out of product information, including one of the most impressive of uses that I have seen in a while of all…
Cortex-M0+ a year after: smaller, thriftier and smarter!
As usual it happened late on Friday afternoon. A couple of weeks ago a message arrived in my inbox from one of our latest ARM® Cortex™-M0+ partners: "We're using 90LP and a similar configuration…
How ARM Compiler detects stack overflows or malicious tampering
Stack buffer overflows are an all too common failure mode in embedded systems where a program accidentally, or maliciously, overwrites fixed-length buffers on the call stack resulting in loss of system…
Combining large and small compute engines - ARM Cortex-A7
Today the ARM Cortex-A7 processor was announced...the power of big.Little processing is finally realized!
I drive a Honda Fit, mainly for the fuel efficiency, on a 20 mile city street commute. Sometimes…