The ARM Developers Conference ended Thursday afternoon. We spent three days learning about one of the most prolific chip intellectual property licensor on the planet. ARM designs the technology at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking, and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security, and storage devices.

What  is ARM? It was a 1983 offshoot of the UK's Acorn Computer group. The original goal was to produce a low-latency input/output (interrupt) handling RISC CPU. From 1983 to 1986, they twiddled bits and out of that came the ARM2 which featured a 32-bit data bus, a 32-bit (4 Gigabyte) address space, and sixteen 32-bit registers. In 1999, they added DSP (digital signal processing) instruction set extensions to their architecture.
 

Today ARM's Roadmap shows they have shipped over 12 billion units, with 3 billion of those units going out the door last year. ARM has 500 licensed partners and over 200 of them are chip foundry partners.

The next generation of digital entertainment and mobile communications devices are driving the need for flexible high-performance processing solutions with low-power requirements. Smartphones are becoming the center of everyone’s lives, because they combine entertainment, gaming, Internet services, along with IM (instant messaging), and traditional audio for your mobile telephone reception.

The latest ARM CortexTM-A8 processor is the first applications processor based on the ARMv7 architecture and is the highest performance, most power-efficient processor available from ARM. With the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz, the Cortex-A8 processor can meet the requirements for power-optimized mobile devices needing operation in less than 300mW (milliwatt is equal to one thousandth of a watt.).

The Cortex-A8 has an optional integrated, size configurable (128K - 1M) L2 cache which provides optimal access to larger data sets. It supports data streaming for applications, and minimizes external bus traffic. This processor is performance-optimized for consumer applications requiring 2000 Dhrystone MIPS - like smartphones, gaming consoles, and MID coming out in 2009 and 2010.

There were three full days of presentations from ARM partners such as Atmel, Dolby Labs, Synopsys, QNX operating system, Texas Instruments (TI), Symbian, Qsound Labs, NXP Semiconductors. Along with members of ARM's engineering staff they gave presentations about their specific implementations of the ARM IP core.

Brian Schmidt, from Qsound Labs, gave an interesting presentation about how sound is implemented on gaming consoles down to the simplest mobile phones. With over 20 years in developing sound on computers, Schmidt had some interesting specific examples of the traps sound designers often fall into when designing music and special effects. Sound designers have to deal with polyphonic wavetable synthesizers, 3D (three dimensional) audio, multi-speaker system surround synthesis, and virtual surround sound capability. An interesting example he gave was how 3D sound effects are great with headphones. But, a sound designer's application must be able to make the switch from high-quality 3D headset environment, over to lower-quality sound from the device's built-in speaker.

Texas Instruments' Yoann Foucher talked about implementing multiprocessors in a cost efficient design. One of the obvious problems that can be a real “gotcha ya” is: who boots first? TI has chosen the ARM 32-bit Cortex-M3 energy-friendly processor for use in critical automotive applications. Foucher outlined a few of the hurdles that an automotive dashboard designer has to consider. One Such hurdle is being able to minimize power consumption during ignition-off. All peripheral modules must have a built-in low-power mode to control their internal clock. A configurable on-chip, low-power oscillator (LP OSC) provides both a low-speed and high-speed clock, which can be used for low-power modes with cyclic wake-up (snooze) mode.

As you can tell, any place a designer has need for a low-power, low-latency, high-performance CPU or GPU, they should be talking to ARM about their product line.
 

There was an extensive vendor exhibition where we spotted some people who are very familiar with the ARM technology, including a booth with Tata Elxsi. Their booth person explained Tata's knowledge of embedded ARM processors, expertise with specialty tools and development techniques. This particular board was showing their ARM SOC implementation driving a game console display.

There is more to come in our next installment about ARM Developers Conference 2008 X