ARM Community: Free technical sessions, giveaways galore at ARM TechCon 2012 - ARM Community

The final countdown has begun towards ARM TechCon 2012 and one thing I’m looking forward to is a bit of warmer weather in Santa Clara. The weather over here in the United Kingdom has been pretty dire over the last week and is said to be very cold next week.

I just wanted to give you a little more insight as to what is on offer next week, including highlighting some opportunities to pick up some cool freebies showcasing some of the latest ARM technology on offer. There’s so much going on next week so I’m sorry I can’t list everything but this should give you an idea of what you can expect.

There are lots of free sponsored sessions at the show again this year, in addition to the main conference programme. If you’ve already registered for the event then you may well have received an email recently with a link to enable you to pick which ones you want to attend. I’m particularly interested in the ‘Power Efficient big.LITTLE™ Processing: Lessons Learned from a 28nm Multi-Core Cortex-A7 Low-Power Implementation’ which is on the Tuesday at 11.30, shortly after the keynotes from Simon Segars and Jack Sun have finished. Here is a new video that ARM have produced to give more details on big.LITTLE processing. There are more details on the keynotes at the TechCon website and also in my blog from last week. If you’re interested in big.LITTLE then take a look at the Google Hangout that took place a few days ago.

So on to the giveaways; Freescale will be doing board giveaways in their sponsored sessions throughout the week this year. During the Freescale ARM Portfolio Overview session, the Vybrid controller solutions session and Kinetis K series MCU session, attendees will receive coupon for 50% off a development tool, and during the i.MX session Freescale will raffle off a few of their latest boards. Lastly, during the Kinetis L series MCU session, all class attendees will receive a coupon for a free Freescale Freedom development platform to be mailed to them shortly after the event. Make sure you visit Freescale in booth 500 to see their latest ARM Cortex demos on the Wednesday and Thursday.

NXP have a dedicated web page highlighting their attendance at the show. They list four sponsored sessions all with opportunities for freebies – starting with Making USB Easy with LPC MCU Products (all attendees will receive a FREE LPCXpresso development kit while supplies last), GUI Development Made Easy (all attendees will qualify for a chance to win a FREE LPC4088 development kit), NXP Controller Solutions Ecosystem: Introduction to NXP's LPCXpresso IDE; CMSIS Drivers; Free USB Stack, Free emWIN Graphics, Tools, and More! (attendees will receive a FREE NXP development kit while supplies last), and Maximize Your Design with Dual-Core Architecture and Unique Peripherals from NXP: SCT, SGPIO, SPIFI (all attendees will qualify for a chance to win a FREE NXP development kit while supplies last). The NXP sessions in previous years have always been a huge success so reserve your slot now! Be sure to visit NXP for live demonstrations at booth #713.

Samsung, in addition to a keynote on Wednesday morning titled "Enabling the Super Devices of Tomorrow", have a web page giving details of what they are showcasing at ARM TechCon this year. Samsung will be at booth #606 showing four ARM Mali demonstrations and offering the ‘opportunity to learn about how Samsung's Exynos application processors define mobility through multimedia excellence and low power optimization’. There will also be daily drawings to win Samsung Galaxy Tablets. The team at Samsung have a nice video describing their attendance at the event. Sessions from Samsung this year include A New Era in Mobile Computing with GPU Compute on Exynos, a session on big.LITTLE moving from Concept to Reality with Exynos and a detailed session on the Exynos platform.

Microsemi have just announced their new SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA and will be giving a overview of this on Thursday, Nov. 1 in room 207 at 10.30a.m. Check out the full details of Microsemi activity on their web page. Microsemi will demonstrate to attendees how they can design the most secure, highest reliability and lowest power systems with its new SmartFusion2 SoC FPGAs at booth #60.

Xilinx recently made a cool announcement on XA Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoCs devices. Check out the video which gives lots of information on the requirements for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Xilinx are presenting at a number of sessions at the show including Real Time and Multicore Processors – Helping Them Work Together, A Case Study on Mapping Physical Simulation Algorithms to Heterogeneous Computing Platforms Utilizing Multi-core CPUs, Compute Accelerators and / or FPGAs, Accelerating Multimedia Performance of Your ARM Processor with a Coprocessor, Low-Power and Multicore Processing: Optimizing Performance and Power with Programmable Systems, and Algorithmic Acceleration of Processing Systems Using High-Level Synthesis. Xilinx will also be hosting a panel sessions - Critical System Design Challenges for a Secure World: Alternative Approaches and What Remains To Be Done taking place on Thursday, November 1, 12:00 p.m. – 12:45 p.m., on the Expo Floor - join experts from Xilinx, ARM and other industry leaders as they look at alternative hardware, software and combined hardware/software approaches to system challenges such as secure boot, data encryption, tamper and failure detection, key storage, support for multiple operating systems and software stacks. Key technologies discussed will include ARM TrustZone, IP cores, hypervisors, and secure boot capabilities.

Don’t forget to check out the ARM sessions too.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention the Halloween activities taking place next week – check out for more details of prize drawings, candy giveaways and the ARM Halloween Bash – including scary movies in the theater, hopefully not including any of my videos showcased on ARMFlix.

My flights, hotel, car rental and particularly frightening Halloween costume are all booked – I look forward to seeing you next week at the show. I’ll be the one all suited and booted helping my buddy Stuart Waldron carry around all his camera equipment! See you there.

What: ARM TechCon 2012

Where: Santa Clara, CA, Santa Clara Convention Centre

When: Conference & Exhibits – October 30-November 1, 2012

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.