ARM Community: ARM TechCon Day 3: The Embedded Side – Everything Cortex-M and more… - ARM Community

Day three of ARM Techcon 2011 was a much sunnier affair than the previous day as the record audiences flocked again to the busy exhibition floor and technical sessions – I think it’s time we all agreed that ARM Embedded is moving from ‘the beginning’ (as I alluded to in a blog a year or so ago) to a real player and there is so much more on the way – check out Richard York’s blog on the latest details about Cortex-M success and shipments.

As you may have already seen in the ARM TechCon blog from day 3, the day started off with Mike Muller’s keynote where he introduced 64-bit processing to the ARM architecture. Whilst this was great news it reminded me to check when my technical papers are in future as one of my afternoon papers on Porting Code from 8-bit/16-bit architectures to ARM clashed with Richard Grisenthwaite technical paper on the ARMv8 Introduction – I have to admit he had a bit of a bigger audience, which is to be expected considering the significance of the event. You can find a copy of the full presentation HERE, it’s a good read.

For those of you may have who missed some of the papers, through a clash or because you weren’t able to attend the show, then you will get the chance to catch some of it again at the ARM TechCon Virtual Conference which will present some specially selected general session content and technical presentations from the live ARM TechCon. The two-day virtual conference will also include three of the keynote addresses presented at ARM TechCon. Check it out for more details. My joint paper with Joseph Yiu (author of the Definitive Guide to the Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M3 books) on the Cortex Microcontroller System Design Kit (CMSDK) from day one of the live show will be shown at the virtual event.

On the final day of the show I managed to catch up with a few more members of the ARM Connected Community. Firstly, I chatted Shaun Prestridge from IAR Systems who gave me the low down on the new features included in the latest version of the Embedded Workbench for ARM, including stack analysis and ITM event logging.



I also caught up with the Cypress Semiconductor team at the show and found out some more information about the ARM Cortex-M powered TrueTouch Gen4 touchscreen controller chip and more details on the software story behind the PSoC5 ARM Cortex-M3 powered product line.





Atmel were another one of the many ARM Partners who took the opportunity to launch a new product at the premier ARM event of the year. This product launch was about their ARM Cortex-M4 powered SAM4S family. I spoke with Bob Martin to get the details on this and the latest update to the ARM9 family of products.



Keep an eye out for an upcoming blog from Joseph Yiu on the NXP Cortex-M0 LPC1100 microcontroller news highlighted earlier in the show and we’ll have a wrap-up video of the whole event packed up in one great video clip. If you can’t wait that long (it won’t be long honest and it’ll be worth the wait) then take a look at a slideshow on the EETimes website (which we found courtesy of the Freescale twitter feed).

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.