ARM Community: East Greets West 2: Embedded Seminars: Rise of ARM Microcontroller Devices - ARM Community

Last week I wrote about my visits to Shanghai and Beijing as part of the 2010 ARM Embedded Development Seminar road show highlighting ARM’s Cortex-M microcontroller processor family, our Partners’ ARM-based products and ARM’s tools for Linux. I left you as a tornado was heading towards Shenzhen. Thankfully the tornado wasn’t so bad in the area I was staying and here I am to tell you about the final stops in China with record attendance and continued growth of Cortex-M devices.

Shenzhen Embedded Seminar: MCUs and CoreSight Debug Tools
Shenzhen has seen some dramatic growth over the last thirty years. Its Special Economic Zone status has seen it grow from a small fishing village of a few hundred fishermen to be southern mainland China's major financial centre. There is also a lot of high tech here!

The same format for the presentations was used as we had at the earlier events, with ARM presentations in the morning and ARM MCU vendor presentations in the afternoon. My third presentation was all about the extra debug technology that’s included out-of-the-box in the Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 products and how this technology enables a far greater debug experience than has ever been possible with microcontrollers before – a similar presentation, this time given by one of my colleagues, Alex Growcoot, is available on the ARMflix channel. The presentation highlights the massive debug improvements and capabilities available when using Coresight-based debug and makes start-stop debug through JTAG look positively outdated.



Chengdu Seminar: Large Attendance and Connected Community Partners
Next and final stop was Chengdu in the Sichuan region of China, famous for its spicy food (more about that later) and pandas. Here we were overwhelmed by the seminar attendance which was nearly 40% above expectations. It’s always hard to gauge what the attendance will be at open event like this but clearly we used the right channels to advertise this and the previous event and it showed that there is a huge level of interest in the subject material.

At each of the events there was an ARM Connected Community area which enabled the attendees to meet with representatives from the local ARM distributors and ARM MCU vendors to ask questions and see demos of ARM development boards and the Keil MDK-ARM microcontroller development kit.

The types of questions that are asked after a presentation always help in understanding whether it has been pitched at the right level. I’m pleased to say that the questions were from people who wanted just that little more detail about some of the features I had been describing so I came away happy that my presentations had been well received.

Year of ARM based Microcontroller?
I came away from the four events with a really good feeling for Cortex-M based microcontrollers in China – one colleague even said to me that this is definitely the year of the ARM based microcontroller, and this is just the beginning. There is already a huge range of Cortex-M devices that are available for customer, the last time I tried to count these there were over 350, and Freescale will add another 200 with the Kinetis family of Cortex-M4 (see my blog about Kinetis) based parts later this year.

Chengdu’s Spicy and Interesting Food
Finally, I just wanted to mention food again before I finish – Chengdu is rather unique in its culinary offerings. On my last night we visited a recommended local restaurant where you cook the food in a pot in the middle of the table. Our pot was divided into two, one side containing the really spicy sauce and the other a very mild broth. Even just tasting a drop of the spicy sauce from the chopstick took my breath away. You basically get a selection of food including chicken, pork, beef, fish, mushrooms (and a few other ingredients) and you add it to the pot, let it cook and marinate and just dig in.



For those of you who like to experiment with local delicacies, take a look at what also arrived at the table!



So how can I summarise my trip - two great weeks, four great seminars, a lot of hard work, fantastic attendance, interesting (!) and exciting food, great feedback and some (heavy) rain – what more can you ask?

Well, I’ll take this chance to ask you…
Have a question about the Cortex-M processor family?
Any requests for future blog topics?
Do you have a favorite Cortex-M device?

Andy Frame, CPU Product Manager, ARM, is based in Cambridge and is fanatical about the success of the Cortex-M3 and how it is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for 32-bit MCU’s. Since joining ARM in 1995, Andy has had a variety of roles from Software Tools Technical Training though to Business Development, joining the CPU product management team about two years ago to look after Cortex-M3.

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