Product category:
Intellectual Property Cores
News Release from: ARM | Subject: Cortex-R4
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 16 May 2006
Processor prepares for the next
generation
The Cortex-R4 processor for the next generation of mobile phones, hard-disk drives, printers and automotive designs, targets more than one billion units in the embedded market.
ARM has unveiled its new Cortex-R4 processor for the next generation of mobile phones, hard-disk drives, printers and automotive designs, targeting more than one billion units in the embedded market The Cortex-R4 processor delivers exceptional performance and efficiency to execute the complex control algorithms and real-time workloads in next-generation embedded products
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 10 Oct 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Cortex-R4 processor enables configurability during synthesis to optimise the processor for different embedded applications through the memory protection unit, caches and tightly coupled memory (TCM).
It does this without compromising the underlying ARM instruction set compatibility, maximising the reuse of existing software investments by application developers and third parties.
"For many years the low power, low cost ARM processor has been the architecture of choice for embedded microprocessor applications", said Will Strauss, President and Principal Analyst, Forward Concepts.
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"With the Cortex-R4 processor, ARM has listened to its customers and produced the product needed for the next generation of design challenges, continuing the ARM tradition of finding the market sweet spot and providing appropriate solutions to serve that market".
The enhanced configurability of the Cortex-R4 processor provides specific benefits for key markets.
For 3G smartphone designs, the boost in performance from the Thumb-2 instruction set allows the Cortex-R4 processor to be used in place of the two separate processors that would traditionally be used in 3G baseband modems.
This saves cost and complexity while still running all of the same code.
For the hard-disk drive (HDD) market, alongside reduced cost benefits, tightly coupled memory (TCM) capabilities offer smaller and more efficient integration with rapid response times.
For the printer market, the Cortex-R4 processor provides increased performance at reduced costs within the same power budget enabling vendors to add new features and functions at the same price point.
For automotive applications, the Cortex-R4 processor includes fault tolerance for critical safety applications as well as memory protection that supports the latest version of the OSEK real time operating system.
This is important for building system-on-chip (SoC) devices for engine management systems that have to run in real-time with a wide range of peripherals.
"The embedded market is evolving rapidly as systems become more sophisticated and software workloads increase in computational size and complexity", said John Cornish, VP, Marketing, Processor Division, ARM.
"The new Cortex-R4 processor meets the needs of next-generation embedded products by delivering exceptional performance, efficiency, and configurability.
This latest member of our Cortex processor family gives chip designers unparalleled capabilities for the development of 3G phones, hard-disk drives, imaging and automotive systems".
The Cortex-R4 processor provides the increased performance essential to address the diverse needs of the embedded market.
The processor features an advanced microarchitecture with dual instruction issue capability to deliver more than 600DMIPS in a performance optimised 90nm implementation, based on the ARM Artisan Advantage library.
The processor also provides key savings in cost and power consumption for system developers, occupying less than 1mm2 and consuming less than 0.27mW/MHz in an area optimised 90nm implementation.
ARM has already secured three lead licensees for the Cortex-R4 including Broadcom, and the processor has received support from major EDA, RTOS and tools vendors.
"Broadcom's design teams have been working with ARM to accelerate our leadership position in a number of markets, including next-generation storage, networking, and mobile devices", said Ed Frank, VP of Research and Development, Broadcom.
"The new Cortex-R4 processor from ARM will bring significant performance and functionality benefits to our products and enhance the end user's experience.
ARM has developed a full range of supporting technology around the new processor to reduce design time and accelerate time to market.
This complete system solution includes development and debug tools, modelling technology and physical cell libraries.
The Cortex-R4 processor is supported by the ARM RealView Develop family of software development tools, the RealView Create family of ESL tools and models, and CoreSight debug and trace technology for developing embedded systems quickly.
The efficient design enables higher performance at lower clock frequencies than previous ARM processors and the optimised Artisan Metro memories can provide a further reduction in the size and cost of embedded systems.
The Amba Designer design automation tool provides a design flow for advanced Amba interconnect subsystems, further reducing implementation costs and time to market.
Additionally, the Amba 3 AXI protocol-compliant ARM PrimeCell peripherals including the Amba 3 AXI interconnect (PL301), configurable dynamic memory controller (PL340), static memory controller family (PL350) and L2 cache (L220) further improve the performance of the processor.
The Cortex-R4 processor runs the ARMv7 ISA making it fully backwards compatible with existing ARM code that powers billions of systems around the world, and is optimised for the Thumb-2 instruction set.
This allows numerous benefits including lower clock speed, bringing power-saving advantages; higher performance, which offers feature-rich additions to mobile phones and automotive designs; and more complex algorithms for higher performance digital imaging and hard-disk drive systems.
Using the Thumb-2 instruction set, together with the ARM RealView Development Suite, allows on-chip memory sizes to be reduced by up to 30%, saving significant cost in the system.
In addition it can produce a 40% performance improvement over the previous Thumb instruction set running on an ARM946E-S processor.
As memory is an increasingly large proportion of a chip, this provides a significant saving in area and cost to chip makers using the processor for SoC devices.
The ARM Cortex-R4 processor is available for licensing now, along with the majority of the supporting technology.
The instruction set simulator (ISS) and RealView Development Suite tools environment for the Cortex-R4 processor is available today to lead and existing licensees, and for general release on request.
The complementary technologies for implementing full SoC solutions such as the Amba 3 AXI interconnect (PL301), configurable dynamic memory controller (PL340), static memory controller family (PL350) and L2 cache (L220) are all available now.
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