Category: ARM TechCon

XMOS xCORE-XA with ARM Cortex-M3

Posted by – December 17, 2013

XMOS is a manufacturer of multicore micro-controller devices. xCORE-eXtended Architecture (the XA Family) combines multicore microcontroller technology with an ultra-low-power ARM® Cortex®-M3 processor, to create the next wave in programmable system-on-chip (SoC) products. The xCORE-XA architecture allows embedded system designers to use high-level software to configure a device with the exact set of interfaces and peripherals needed for their design, while re-using existing ARM binary code and standard library functions, and taking advantage of ultra-low energy fixed-function peripherals. Designers can also add real-time data-plane plus control processing and DSP blocks, using multiple xCORE processor cores, with the ARM available to run control plane processing software such as communication protocol stacks, standard graphics libraries, or complex monitoring systems.

You can read more about it here: http://www.xmos.com/de/products/silicon/xa-series

Montavista Linux on ARM solutions

Posted by – December 15, 2013

MontaVista Software was founded in 1999 to bring the Linux operating system to the embedded device market. From the beginning the goal has been to embrace fully Open Source. MontaVista delivered their first commercial Linux for the embedded market in 1999 and hasn’t looked back since. Today over 2000 companies trust MontaVista Linux to run their products. MontaVista Software does embedded Linux commercialization. They help get the most of open source by providing commercial quality Linux and developer tools to reduce the time and effort required to deliver commercial products to market. They offer expert support, hardware enablement, and the resources of the MontaVista community, there are over 50 million ARM Powered devices in the market today running on MontaVista Linux.

$149 Inforce IFC6410 Qualcomm APQ8064 S4 Pro Development Board Computer

Posted by – December 14, 2013

Inforce is an embedded Pico-ITX development kit maker using Qualcomm, here their latest APQ8064 SoC with 2GB RAM in a compact dev board retailing at $149. The boards come with basic connections like micro hdmi, micro sd, and ethernet. Inforce also sells a larger more fully featured version of the boards with a battery and camera. The boards have a wide variety applications in embedded computing ranging from software development and hobby uses to medical uses. Future versions of the board will come with the upcoming Snapdragon 8084 processor.

You can read more about the IFC6410 here: http://www.inforcecomputing.com/product/moreinfo/ifc6410.html

$26 Freescale Vybrid powered Colibri VF50 and VF61 by Toradex

Posted by – December 11, 2013

The all-new additions to Toradex’ Colibri product family are a couple of Freescale Vybrid SoC-powered low-power, small form-factor devices. The Colibri VF50 and the Colibri VF61, based respectively on Freescale Vybrid VF5xx and Vybrid VF6xx family of SoC. To give you a little more information, the Vybrid VF5xx family is a single-core (ARM Cortex-A5) solution with 1.5 MB on-chip SRAM, DDR2/3, high-speed USB with PHY, dual Ethernet and a host of other interfaces. On the other hand, the Vybrid VF6xx family is a dual-core (ARM Cortex-A5 plus ARM Cortex-M4) solution with 1.5 MB on-chip SRAM, DDR2/3, dual XiP quad SPI memory interfaces, dual high-speed USB with PHY, dual Ethernet, and a digital/analog video camera interface. The modules are also priced at an unbelievable USD 26 and USD 39 respectively for the Colibri VF50 and the Colibri VF61 (for high volumes). Toradex’ Colibri VF50 and VF61 are both SODIMM sized computer module with an emphasis, according to the company, on delivering cost-effective CPU, and graphic performance with a low power footprint. The dual-core on the Colibri VF61 makes it ideal for solutions that run a commercial operating system on the Cortex-A class core while the Cortex-M core runs an RTOS for time and security-critical operations. This kind of arrangement eliminates the need for an external MCU or field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

Luke Shield’s Open Source Platform for Development


Luke Shields of JCSC shows off his supposed to be platform for open source platform development in schools, encouraging children to experiment making hardware, re-painting old home consoles, integrate ARM development boards, modulate, what you want may not be what I want and what I want may not be what you want. Check it out.

Calxeda ECX-2000 ARM Cortex-A15 Server Processor

Posted by – December 3, 2013

Calxeda shows their new ARM Cortex-A15 based ECX-2000 supporting 16GB RAM on quad-core, used by HP in one of their new HP Moonshot ARM Server platform. Performance is 2x to 3x faster than their previous ARM Cortex-A9 Server platform. Calxeda also has 2 64bit ARM Server chips on their Roadmap with full production systems to be expected for early 2015 or so.

You can read more about Calxeda ECX-2000 at http://www.calxeda.com/ecx-2000-family/

ARM Accredited MCU Engineer (AAME) Training Exam

Posted by – December 3, 2013

Chris Shore, ARM Training and Education Manager and Daniel Dearing, ARM Engineering Qualifications Manager talk about the ARM Accredited MCU Engineer Exam, having provided day-long training sessions for spreading information about accreditation for engineers working with the ARM ecosystem.

Read more at http://www.arm.com/support/arm-accredited-engineer-program/accreditations/arm-accredited-mcu-engineer/

nCore HPC ARM+DSP Super Computer

Posted by – November 29, 2013

nCore HPC presents the BrownDwarf Y-class supercomputer, a heterogeneous ARM- and DSP-based super computer system using Texas Instrument’s ARM+DSP Server design on a blade. nCore’s primary customer is the US government. The supercomputer uses a heterogeneous architecture with 4 Arm Cortex A15 cores and 24 DSP cores with 16gb of memory per node and 1.2 terrabytes of physical memory in total. With HPC applications you need to hold much of what you are doing in memory. The vast amounts of computing power in the super computers have a wide variety applications such as medical imaging and simulation. Through programming you can divide programs among the ARM and DSP.

Company Website: http://www.ncoredesign.com/

InSignal Samsung Exynos5420 Arndale Octa Board

Posted by – November 23, 2013

InSignal shows the Exynos5420 Arndale Octa Board, with four ARM Cortex-A15, four ARM Cortex-A7, six Mali-T628, adding eMMC, PCI, HDMI, Sound, USB device, USB Host, Ethernet, Camera module, providing full development board platform for developers wanting to develop solutions based on the Samsung Exynos5420, possibly the fastest ARM Processor on the market today. We may see quite advanced software development for Android, Chrome OS (or Chromium OS), Ubuntu and more. People can order it right now for $179 at pyrustek.com

Samsung Wide IO Memory Interface for the faster and lower power ARM Processors of the future

Posted by – November 21, 2013

Memory bandwidth is one of the most important features in an SoC to get performance. Here presenting Samsung’s new memory architecture, possibly (my guess) to be used in Exynos6 (64bit) possibly at 20nm or perhaps even 14nm even, Samsung talks about their upcoming Wide-IO faster Memory Interface architecture for future ARM Processors to input and output much faster memory bandwidth. To run the same workload, it can use 60-70% less power of the memory plus memory interface power within the SoC, which is a large part of the power consumption within an ARM SoC, Samsung is ready with the technology. The business is about the timing, they are aiming for the best timing to introduce this technology. Provides for example 17gbit/s memory bandwidth, allowing to increase memory bandwidth possibly above 100gbit/s, to be confirmed as better technology is implemented. The history of LP-DDR is to increase the frequency to increase memory bandwidth, but with Samsung’s Wide-IO memory design, they can increase the memory lines instead and thus achieve much better memory bandwidth, possibly running 2-3x faster memory bandwidth at the same frequency, perhaps something like 50gbit/s easily. The demand for the memory bandwidth for smartphone devices will surpass memory bandwidth for the traditional desktop PC.

Samsung Exynos5420 HMP big.LITTLE demo

Posted by – November 21, 2013

Samsung shows HMP big.LITTLE mode working on the Exynos5420, Heterogeneous Multi Processing means that you can manage the 8 big.LITTLE cores independently and use them all at the same time. Showing HMP mode achieving a higher benchmark result over IKS process switching mode on the same CPU and on the same exact tablet hardware. Even being able to do full Octa Core Exynos5420 CPU and the full 6-core Mali-T628 GPU performance using renderscript at the same time heterogeneously achieving the maximum performance and at the same time also improving battery life when doing the same task. Showing here some advanced photo editing app using renderscript to optimize performance of that type of app.

AAEON CRS-200S-2R 48TB Calxeda ARM Cortex-A15 Powered Storage Server Board Solution

Posted by – November 18, 2013

The AAEON CRS-200S-2R is the first ARM-based storage solution for the company’s Poseidon family of rackmount products targeted to serve the needs of cloud computing, high-density storage appliances and IP surveillance applications. The 1U AAEON CRS-200S-2R system is equipped with 12 3.5-insh SATA drives (other device options available) supported by three (3) Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-2000 series SoCs (Server-on-chips) that use the ARM Cortex-A15 quad-core processors. Storage solutions that need high performance without the often-obligatory high power consumption, the AAEON CRS-200S-2R is a viable candidate for use. Power Consumption including all 12 3.5″ 3/4TB hard drives is 150W vs 250W for a x86 storage server solution doing just about the same.

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Samsung Semi 14nm FinFet Design Optimization

Posted by – November 16, 2013
Category: Samsung, ARM TechCon

Samsung Semi prepares their upcoming 14nm ARM Process manufacturing. Enabling greater performance in less power usage, the technology itself is about to be available.

LSI Axxia 5500 16-core ARM Cortex-A15

Posted by – November 10, 2013

LSI shows their 16-core ARM Cortex-A15 at ARM Techcon 2013, for networking, storage equipment, base stations and more. The LSI Axxia 5500 product family of communication processors designed to accelerate performance and increase power efficiency for multi-radio base stations and 4G/LTE-capable wireless networks. The LSI Axxia 5500 product family is first to combine 16 ARM cores with LSI specialized networking accelerators to optimize performance and power efficiency. LSI will also use ARM Cortex-A57 ARMv8 64bit in the future.

ARM CEO Simon Segars at ARM Techcon 2013

Posted by – November 3, 2013

ARM CEO talks about some of the things he does as CEO of ARM, spending a lot of time talking to people about what they are doing, and then going back to the office to make sure ARM is doing the right thing to support it all. The ARM ecosystem is growing. The breadth of end markets ARM is being designed into is increasing. After powering virtually every mobile device on the planet, ARM is getting into Servers and also looking into the Internet of Things, which is a very different computing problem. It’s still about getting the right amount of compute power, making it as low power as possible, as small and as low cost as possible.

Understand ARM big.LITTLE with Brian Jeff, Product Manager, Roadmap

Posted by – November 3, 2013

Watch this overview of latest the ARM Technology with Brian Jeff, Product Manager at ARM. He talks about big.LITTLE, ARM Cortex-A series, 64bit, latest Mali Graphics implementations and more. Nearly a dozen designs are about to go through with big.LITTLE, it’s ready on production chips, shipping in devices on the market, and the new version of the software will make it into devices next year.

Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief EETimes

Posted by – November 3, 2013

Rick Merritt provides an overview of the ARM Techcon 2013, talking about some of the latest stories published in EETimes, talking about some of his stories written from the ARM Techcon, talking about some of the highlights at ARM Techcon and in General Technology.

Calypto high-level synthesis, RTL power optimization and functional verification

Posted by – November 3, 2013

Calypto Design Systems family of products enables ASIC, SOC and FPGA designers to quickly create fully-verified, power-optimized RTL for downstream synthesis and physical design. With Calypto’s Catapult High-Level Synthesis products, designers have the option of using SystemC or C++ to dramatically shorten the design cycle by producing correct-by-construction, error-free, PPA optimized RTL. Calypto’s PowerPro product line enables users to analyze both static and dynamic power usage at RTL and either automatically or manually create a power optimized RTL that includes memory and leakage power optimization. The SLEC family of products formally verifies the complete RTL without the need for time consuming simulation and complex testbenches. The end result is dramatic reduction in time to market with up to 60% reduction in power usage.

Contact Calypto:
Mathilde Karsenti
Marketing Programs Manager | Calypto Design Systems
1731 Technology Drive, Suite 340, San Jose, CA 95110
c: 503.970.7410

Stuart Clubb
US FAE Manager | Calypto Design Systems
8005 SW Boeckman Rd, Wilsonville, OR 97070
w: 503.685.1859 | f: 503.685.7832 | c: 503.701.6915 | www.calypto.com

Rob Eccles
Field Applications Engineer| Calypto Design Systems
1731 Technology Drive, Suite 340, San Jose, CA 95110
w: 408.477.8170

ARM shows the Internet of Things and MBED at ARM Techcon 2013

Posted by – November 3, 2013

The mbed development platform is the fastest way to create Internet of Things devices based on ARM microcontrollers. Anyone with an idea, can rapidly prototype devices using it, connect the idea to the cloud, form a proof of concept that can get the idea funded, demonstrate to the boss that the idea can fly.

Intel to make ARM Processors, firstly 64bit 14nm ARM Cortex-A53 ARMv8 for Altera

Posted by – October 31, 2013

Nathan Brookwood is an Analyst and Research Fellow at Insight 64, he is the source for the Forbes article The new Intel CEO has changed Intel’s policy, now deciding that it’s actually OK to manufacture ARM Processors in their Fab. Possibly now Intel is also going to make ARM Processors for Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD or someone else, possibly also even for themselves, possibly releasing a whole range of Intel ARM Processors to launch if Intel cares to have some reach into Smartphones, Tablets, ARM Laptops, Smart TVs, ARM Desktops, ARM Servers, I think Intel doesn’t need to not contribute to each of those ARM categories themselves too and by fabricating for Chip Makers, it depends what the new Intel CEO finds to be the thing to do for them.