ARM Community: ARM Partner Collaboration in Full Force at Chip Design Day, ARM TechCon 2011 - ARM Community

Simon Segars, EVP and GM of PIPD Division at ARM, opened the 7^th annual ARM TechCon in a warm and sunny Santa Clara today. The first day of the conference focused on chip design Simon hosted the morning keynotes which started with a talk by Senior Vice President of R&D at TSMC, Dr Shang-Yi Chiang who talked in front of a standing room only auditorium about the TSMC Open Innovation Platform (OIP) and the ARM Connected Community.

Second up was Walden C. Rhines from Mentor Graphics who gave a very entertaining and interesting keynote about how differentiation starts at the product level where he specifically looked at the mobile phone and PC markets. Rhines also detailed steps for Partners to reverse commoditization and gave examples of how Partners have successfully done so.

The third keynote, presented by Chi-Ping Hsu, Senior Vice President of R&D at Cadence, highlighted some of the valuable ways in which ARM and Cadence have been collaborating together, and also took the opportunity to announce the initial production of Ambarella’s 32-nanometer (nm) HD digital camera system-on-chip (SoC). This SoC was built using 32nm gate-first High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology from Samsung Electronics’ foundry business, a complete Cadence digital design flow including the Encounter and Incisive platforms, and ARM Cortex™ processor and Artisan® Physical IP. More details are available at Cadence.com.

Also today Freescale announced their new MCU product based on a combination of the ARM Cortex-A5 and the ARM Cortex-M4. This asymmetrical-multiprocessing-architecture platform incorporates an Cortex-M4 microcontroller and a Cortex-A5 processor to enable simultaneous real-time control, graphics-rich apps processing and flexible connectivity options. In this design 'The Cortex-M4 core is suitable for real-time critical functions such as security and tamper detection while the Cortex-A5 is suitable for applications processing of HMI such as multimedia and connectivity'. Read the full story on Engadget.

We’ve been posting regular tweets about the events that have been taking place all day – check out the @ARMTechCon feed and keep an eye out for more news on Wednesday and Thursday.

At the show today, myself and Katie Morgan managed to get some time with some partners of the ARM Connected Community.

Katie started the day by catching up with Nandan Nayampally, the Director of CPU Product Marketing at ARM, who gave us a quick update since the exciting ARM Cortex-A7 and big.LITTLE processing announcement last week. He discussed how the Cortex-A7 will allow semiconductor vendors and OEMs to provide customers with low cost smartphones with similar performance to high-end smartphones of today, giving almost a billion people internet access. He also mentions that we shouldn’t forget about ARM Cortex-A8, as it will still be a strong player in future consumer devices.



This morning I met with Chris Balough, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Embedded Processing, Altera. Chris gave me an overview of the new SoC FPGA products from Altera, where these will be used and what really excites him about this product line!



Katie also caught up with Kathryn Kranen, the President and CEO of Jasper Design Automation, to talk about their latest collaboration with ARM on the ACE protocol that was announced earlier this year. Jasper has worked with ARM to validate the ACE protocol and prepare the verification IP that goes with ACE. Also, ARM and Jasper hosted a joint seminar at Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June on the collaborative efforts on the making of ACE and the verification IP, check it out here.



I met with David Stewart from CriticalBlue who gave me some insight into what CriticalBlue and programming multi-core devices are all about.



Katie also chatted with Vic Kulkami, the GM & Senior Vice President of the RTL Business Unit at Apache. Vic gave us an update on their latest collaborations with ARM, including a collaborative agreement to create and validate PIPD and the benefits this will have for the ARM customers and designers. Check out the video to find out more the great partnership with Apache and ARM.



Pakaj Mayor, Chief of Staff to CEO and Acting Head of Marketing at Cadence gave me an update on recent collaborations between Cadence and ARM and how customers will benefit from this.



The show finished with a fireside chat with Simon Segars and Lip-Bu Tan, President and CEO of Cadence, at the end of which Simon presented the Award for the ‘Best in Show for Silicon Design Day‘ on the first day to ‘TSMC for their Reference Flow 12 and Analog Mixed Signal Reference Flow 2.0’.

The focus of the conference tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday is software and system design. Tomorrow starts with three more keynotes: Henrik Stahl - Senior Director of Java Product Management at Oracle, Dan Javnozon – Group Project Manager of Windows Embedded Compact at Microsoft, and Harley Feldberg - Corporate VP & President of Avnet Electronics Marketing.

Make sure you visit the ARM TechCon 2011 Video Playlist on ARM’s YouTube channel (ARMFlix) throughout the day for more videos as we post them throughout the event.

Did I miss any key events in your eyes from Day 1?

UPDATE:
More blogs from ARM TechCon 2011:

• Breadth of ARM Ecosystem Demonstrated at Software and Systems Design Day
• ARM Software: Oracle’s Java, Embedded SW Store with Avnet, Mentor & XILINX
• Smart Glasses, Bionic Birds and GPS Goggles at ARM TechCon
• ARM Embedded Success: Freescale, NXP, TI, ST & Record Breaking Rubik’s Cube
• ARM TechCon: ARM CTO Announces ARMv8, UN, Rubik’s Cube & Growth

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.