ARM Community: EW Wrap Up: ARM Partners Expand MCUs in Video, Capacitive Touch & Mixed Signal - ARM Community

I’m now back in a nice and sunny Cambridge and managed to find a few minutes to recap on the success of the 10^th Embedded World show in Nuremburg last week. Following my updates on day one and day two (links are below), this wrap up blog and video give you an overall view of the show right from the beginning to a peaceful ending chilling out on the ARM Cortex™-M3 massage chair, and all of the other good bits in between.

Day 1: ARM Partners Expand MCU Platforms in Industrial, Energy & Motor Control Apps
Day 2: ARM at EW2012: Computer-on-Modules, Smart Grid, Wireless & Massage Chairs



There have been a few other videos published on the ARMFlix Embedded World 2012 playlist from the show over the last few days:

NXP had several demos of Cortex-M technology all the way from Cortex-M0 up to the dual core LPC4300 devices. Here are a couple of them:





Greg Brown from XILINX updated me on the latest news from Embedded World after we first talked with XILINX about this at TechCon last year. The update includes the news that Zynq-7000 platform and boards are now shipping, Greg also described some of the demos that were on display at the booth including video processing & analytics for vehicle driver assistance, industrial demos including real time video tracking control and a medical imaging demonstration.



Bodo Huber, CTO at Phytec, explains to me some more details of the phyFLEX product which was launched at the show.



There has been interesting news coming out of or just after the show, including a new product announcement from ARM - the ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. This new processor builds on the successful low-power and silicon-proven Cortex-M0 processor and has been redesigned from the ground up to add a number of significant new features including single-cycle IO to speed access to GPIO and peripherals, improved debug and trace capability and a 2-stage pipeline to reduce the number of cycles per instruction (CPI) and improve Flash accesses, further reducing power consumption. For more details take a look at the companion blog written by our very own Alan Tringham.

Fujitsu Semiconductor Europe introduced new high-performance capacitive touch functionality for its FM3 Family of ARM Cortex-M3 based microcontrollers and also announced the expansion of its Cortex-R4 based scalable product line-up for automotive instrument clusters, covering everything from MCUs for traditional clusters up to 3D graphic SoCs, and capable of driving virtual or free programmable clusters.

Dialog Semiconductor announced it has licensed the ARM Cortex-M0 processor for use in future generations of its power management ICs (PMICs) which Dialog state is the first time a standard 32-bit processor has been integrated into a mixed signal.

Texas Instruments followed up on my chat with Mione with a companion blog: Embedded Wi-Fi to Connect the Internet of Things.



There will be more follow up guest blogs over the next few weeks, so pop back every now and then to see which new guest blogs have been posted.

Two things before I sign off; I found this very informative whitepaper from Energy Micro about understanding MCU sleep modes and energy savings, and finally, don’t forget to visit ARM and ARM Partners in the ARM Connected Community Pavilion at Booth 1127 at Design West (ESC San Jose) in a couple of weeks time. At the time of writing it looks like there is still the chance to get a discount for the full conference. If you only have time to attend the show floor then maybe also check out the free sponsored sessions with ARM related sessions from Freescale, NXP and Xilinx.

As always keep an eye out for latest news from ARM or ARM-related subjects on Twitter @ARMEmbedded and on the ARMFlix YouTube channel, as well as guest blogs and ARM event information at blogs.arm.com.

Bye for now!

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.