ARM’s Reach Lengthens By Ed Sperling -- 10/19/2004
Electronic News
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- ARM is expanding its processor core lineup, reaching deep into the bottom portion of the market where cost and power consumption are critical issues.
The new Cortex M series is aimed primarily at the microcontroller market, where ARM so far has little presence.
“This extends the reach of ARM to the 8- and 16-bit microcontroller,” said John Cornish, ARM’s director of product marketing. “This is the first of a new family of products, and over the next two to three years you will see an entire Cortex family of products.”
As part of the introduction, ARM is delineating its three product families into A, R, and M series. The A series will focus largely on applications processing in such devices as cellular handsets and will support Linux, Windows CE or Symbian operating systems. The R series will focus on embedded applications that require midrange performance.
The new M series, meanwhile, pushes ARM into an entirely new market. Haydn Povey MCU product manager at ARM, claims that ARM’s M series will add a much-needed boost to that world. “The problem is that if you’re running the new Zigbee devices and supporting TCP/IP stacks, you can’t afford 32-bit performance,” he said.
Making matters worse, he said the market has been fragmented by a broad swath of players, making it difficult for other vendors to support all the players.
“In a car door alone there are many as five different microcontrollers for things like airbags, windows and mirrors,” he said. “What we’re doing is making a 32-bit microcontroller inexpensive for the 16-bit world, and we do that by reducing the number of pins, focus on decreasing memory requirements and only implementing the Thumb 2 instruction set.”
He noted the new line draws 90 microwatts, which is about one-fourth the power consumption of an ARM 7 processor. |
