ARM Community: Embedded - ARM Community

As usual it happened late on Friday afternoon. A couple of weeks ago a message arrived in my inbox from one of our latest ARM® Cortex™-M0+ partners: “We’re using 90LP and a similar configuration to your “min” with just a couple of additional and relatively small options and we can’t match your reported dynamic consumption (11.2µW/MHz). We can’t figure out what’s wrong, can you please help to find out what we may have missed?”

For a fraction of a second I wondered whether I should pretend I was already gone and come back to them on Monday? Well...no, I wanted to get to the bottom of it, and we start exchanging mails: How many tracks for the cell library? Target synthesis frequency? Which precise processor options? And after each exchange, I got even more confused. So focused on the details I had missed the right question from the start: “How far are you over the 11.2µW/MHz?”; answer “Well in fact we are 7% below your figures, around 10.4µW/MHz, and we were not expecting to match your marketing values, even less to be lower. Could it be some parts of the processor are not synthesized or clocked?”

It was now my turn to make a late Friday afternoon call to our implementation manager: “Let me check and try some experiments, I should have something for you on M...

After a long and bleak winter in the UK it was great to arrive back into San Francisco and be greeted by some great sunny weather. The McEnery Conference Centre in San Jose was once again the host to the Design West conference. The building has had a bit of an overhaul since I was last here, and while there is still some construction work taking place outside, the inside is looking greatly improved with a much more modern feel to it.

The show was pretty mixed in terms of how busy it was on the show floor but I happened across this blog from Max Maxfield (who describes himself is his bio as: “Clive ‘Max’ Maxfield is six feet tall, outrageously handsome, English and proud of it. In addition to being a hero, trendsetter, and leader of fashion, he is widely regarded as an expert in all aspects of electronics (at least by his mother)” over on the all programmable planet website who detailed his busy schedule. Hopefully not everyone is having such a busy time! I’ve been meaning to meet with Max for a while as I find his blogs most entertaining and he is also a fellow Sheffield Hallam University alumni but have never managed to catch up with him – from the schedule I can se...

Recently our STMicroelectronics’ dedicated teams traveled to snowy Nuremberg to make the most of the show at Embedded World (EW) (check out some of ARM’s Andy Frame’s highlights)!

We welcomed EW 2013 visitors to a smarter world showcasing our leading embedded processing solutions based on an extensive microcontroller portfolio, from top performance high-end STM32 to Ultra-Low-Power devices.

ST teams were there to demonstrate and speak about Performance, Ultra-Low-Power, Energy Harvesting, Internet of Things, and ….to stand for life.augmented! For ST, life augmented represents making a positive and innovative contribution to people's life across the spectrum of sense, power, automotive products and embedded processing solutions. ST’s products improve people’s lives fr...

Phew, the second day of Embedded World is at a close. In yesterday’s blog we had the chance to meet up with Chris Styles from ARM, Terrance Bar from Oracle, Paul Zoratti from Xilinx and Dr. Majd Zoorob from PhotonStar, and I only walked 5793 steps – today I just about doubled that with 10502 steps and I haven’t yet ventured out into the brisk weather for some dinner and a well-deserved Weissbier!


Today I chatted with ...

BeagleBoard.org announced the winners of the BeagleBone Cape Plug-in Board Design Contest, which invited developers, students, makers and hobbyists worldwide on November 1st to create innovative new capes. These expansion boards, creatively called “capes,” allow hobbyists and makers to quickly and easily enhance BeagleBone’s capabilities with cameras, LCD touch screens, motor controls, battery power and more.

After receiving an overwhelming response, the judging panel selected the three winners: Chris Clark, inventor of Interacto, a cape that provides a foundation for building robots and flying drones; Elias Bakken, creator of Replicape, a cape that functions as a 3D printer for BeagleBone and Matt Ranostay, designer of the Geiger Cape that registers radiation counts from background sources. In addition to receiving a $1,000 cash prize and BeagleBone tools, these winners will see their original cape plug-in board designs manufactured and sold through Circuitco.

Clark created Interacto, a cape that gets BeagleBone interactive with a triple axis accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer plus a 640x480 30fps camera. All sensors are digital and communicate via I2C to the BeagleBone. The camera frames are cap...

GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors, or GCC ARM Embedded for short, version 4.7 is available HERE. The previously released version, 4.6 had over 30,000 downloads (see HERE). As well as new features such as MAC OS hosting, GDB enhancement, and other optimizations, the most exciting feature in version 4.7 is the reduction in generated code size.

Why code size? The reason, and something that most MCU software developers already know, lies in the extreme resource limitation and cost sensitivity of MCU programming. For those who haven’t experienced this, here are some quotations from some of our users:

"Please please please remember that we are seeing more and more memory limited parts in this world - for example, 4KB flash, 1KB RAM - and every word of “stack space” used, never mind the flash size consumed by code."

"If the total code size exceeds the internal flash memory of the MCU (as in my case) I mu...

The busy time of Electronica and ARM Technology Symposia is now behind us, and I finally get the opportunity to have a deeper look the latest release of NXP: their mini-tiny-LPC800. NXP being one of our lead-partners on the ARM® Cortex™-M0+, and also previously on the Cortex-M0, I was really excited to see what they came up with and how they took advantage of our latest Cortex-M processor.

First of all, I must admit I wasn’t expecting them to set this family on the very lowend, even below their Cortex-M0 LPC1100 series. When we designed the Cortex-M0+ we aimed at offering at least as much the Cortex-M0 does, while adding capabilities to support low-power design even better and to address a wider scope of applications. I was anticipating an upgrade of ...

Designing a differentiated motor drive is a complex task. Often these drives are single-processor that combine constraints of real-time embedded designs such as limited memory size and processing time, with the complications that motors bring - electrical noise and faults. When you add functional safety and certification requirements - the new design, test, and documentation deliverables require a significant amount of additional effort.

Today’s systems are also more complex and more dependent on the electronic control of motoring operations that need to meet strict industry functional safety standards. Whether it is the motor in control of the power steering assist in a car, controlling the lift and doors of an elevator, or a directly connected to the drum of a front load washing machine without belts or gears, functional safety in motor operation is fundamentally important. A motor system designed with functional safety will have a lower level of risk from improper operation. When a failure does occur, whether it is a random or systematic fault, the functionally safe design will detect this fault and respond to minimize impact.

International functional safety standards are defined to ensure that functional safety techniques are detailed for a specific industry sector and that these techniques are consistently applied. IEC 61508 is a basic safety standard which is the basis of all IEC and some ISO functional safety standards. It is u...

2012 has been like the last few years: very rich in new ARM® Cortex™-M microcontrollers as well as collateral and tools making it easier to make the most of them. Here is a summary of the year so far, if you have missed any episode!

We will look at the latest member of the family, the ARM Cortex-M0+. Also we will give you an update on the CMSIS (Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard) before looking at what ARM Partners have been up to. Finally we will advise you three reference books for Cortex-M developers.

ARM Cortex-M0+ processor
First, big news for ARM and the embedded community with the launch of the world’s most energy-efficient processor: the ARM Cortex-M0+ core.

For ...

This week sees the launch on the Cortex-M0+ processor-based Freescale Kinetis L family of MCUs just two months after the official launch of this latest addition to the Cortex-M processor series.

The close partnership between ARM and Freescale, one of the Cortex-M0+ lead-partners, enabled them to be extremely fast in launching their first MCU series. The processor features also triggered the interest of many other partners and we expect more Cortex-M0+ processor-based products to come. To see why, one needs only to look at the processor features.

When the ARM Cortex™-M0+ processor was launched in March, many of the headlines focused on the lower power consumption and energy efficiency. If this was the only differentiator, then this new processor might perhaps have been called “Cortex-M0-...

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are waiting for their very own Raspberry Pi to arrive in the mail. The tiny, ARM-based Linux PC has attracted a whirlwind of attention from hackers, professionals, academia, and therefore the press with an unbeatable price and nearly limitless potential.

It’s a Tuesday morning and I’ve just started on my first cup of joe when my boss approaches with a bundle of electronics under his arm and says, “Look what came in the mail today.” Laying it all out on my desk there’s a monitor, keyboard, mouse, a few cables, and a small plastic package with something square-ish and green inside. Underneath the plastic, I can faintly see the outline of a familiar logo and then recognize it as the one and only, Raspberry Pi.


The publicity and anticipation surrounding the launch of this $35 pocket-sized PC with an ARM1176JZF-S processor has been colossal (go ahead, Google it!), thanks in part to its humanitarian cause and ultra-low price point. Designed by a non-profit UK organization with full intentions of sparking the next generation’s imagination in computer prog...

I don’t think the prospect of rain will affect attendance at the annual tech event now called Design West, which used to be ESC or the Embedded Systems Show - I’m still getting to grips with the name change. But with 250+ companies attending the show, many of whom are part of the ARM® Connected Community® (CC), I’m sure there will be some great technology to see and talk about. Take a look at the show floor map with the ARM Connected Community Partners highlighted to help you plan your route around the show.

At the show this week, Freescale and ARM are demoing CortexTM-M0+ silicon at booth 1607, following up from the launch event that took place a couple of weeks ago.

I first chatted with Thomas Ensergueix, Product manager at A...

In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies must get the best return from their engineering investments. For many this means leveraging that engineering work over multiple projects or markets. This concept of scalability is central to ARM’s business model and has been demonstrated by our silicon partners and OEMs alike. With the availability of the Freescale i.MX6 family of SOCs, however, I believe Freescale has taken the concept of scalability one step further for both themselves as well as for their customers and done so across multiple markets.

Scalability in the ARM Business Model

For years, ARM has delivered scalability by licensing processor cores and graphics IP to numerous semiconductor companies. They in turn integrate additional IP to create System on Chips (SOCs) to address their target markets. Since the semiconductor companies can include different IP for different markets, they can easily scale across multiple segments. They can also target different performance points further enhancing the scalability.

Furthermore, ARM has created multiple processor cores based on the same instruction set but ...

This year’s Design West (formerly ESC) from March 26-29th promises something for every designer with seven different Summits. ARM and its Partners have strong representation at ESC, Android and Multicore. Following on the strong showing at this year’s Embedded World (blog), ESC has over 70 ARM® Partners including nine Partners in the annual ARM Connected Community (CC) Pavilion in the expanded ARM booth #1127.

With the excitement following last week’s ARM Cortex™-M0+ processor launch, the most energy efficient ARM processor available (blog) with lead Part...

Another great day in Nuremburg, the second day of the Embedded World 2012 show which this year is celebrating its 10th birthday. Last year over 18,000 visitors attended the show and with an estimated 800 exhibitors this year - and lots of foot traffic visible today - I’m sure the number of attendees this year is much greater.

I met up with a few new faces and some you may recognise from before today as part of my task to bring you the latest news and updates from the ever increasing percentage of the 800 exhibitors who were demonstrating ARM technology or supporting the ARM architecture.

My first meeting of the day was with Norbert Hauser, Executive Vice President at Kontron who explained to me a little more about the new Kontron Ultra Low Power ARM based computer on module standard – or ULP-COM for short. Kontron has announced the support of the newly introduced NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 quad core mobile processor and ...

I keep an eye on press releases that mention ARM and one that caught my eye a few weeks ago was from a great company called SteelSeries; they build products for dedicated gaming enthusiasts. The release announced their latest mouse, the Sensei:


As the title says, this is the sort of device that, a few years ago, you may never have thought of as something that would need an ARM® processor. But as with many other products that embody a sensor they are rapidly becoming more intelligent.

This little beast embeds inside it an ARM Cortex™-M3 processor-based STMicroelectronics STM32 MCU and I g...

Do you have a need to add USB to your embedded system, yet don't have the time to become an expert on USB? If so you're not alone. When you dig into the nuances of USB you will quickly find that developing a USB-enabled product is a fairly demanding task. While the hardware is simple enough the software can be quite complex. Firmware engineers find that developing the proper software on the device side requires extensive knowledge of the USB interface specification, and implementation of standard device classes like Human Interface Design (HID) or Mass Storage Class (MSC) is an additional layer of complexity, and what's the best use of your time? Becoming an expert on USB, or developing the core application of your product?

For engineers looking to rapidly implement a USB interface using HID or MSC I have found a refreshingly simple solution from NXP. The Cortex-M3 processor-based LPC1343 and t...

Included in the highlights from the Embedded Systems Conference in the very sunny and warm San Jose this week were some new product announcements by ARM.

CoreSight SoC-400 is a highly configurable debug and trace solution for complex SoC designs, check out my colleague Alex Growcoot's blog about this over on the @SoftwareOnARM ARM blog pages.

DS-5™ Professional Edition builds on the success of the ARM Compiler, integrating it in a complete suite of Eclipse-based software development tools, including the DS-5 Debugger and ...

Avnet’s Design Strategies for ARM® Systems seminar series has already touched down in eight cities in North America, and trained nearly 1,000 design engineers on ARM-based processor solutions. We’ve received some great feedback on the show and in each city, I’m inevitably asked the same question, “Why would Avnet and ARM partner to put on this show?” The answer is simpler than you think.



With the broadest range of options for developing new products that leverage innovative technology for the semiconductor industry’s top manufacturers, ARM’s power-efficient cores can enable a broad spectrum of silicon solutions. Likewise, Avnet Electronics Marketing offers a comprehensive line card, representing the entire spectrum of technologies as well as a robust team of field focused resources including field application engineers (FAEs), technical experts and pricing specialists to help customers move from detailed design to complete end-to-end solutions. The combination of the two ...

It’s taken me a whole week to get over the buzz and excitement (and lots and lots of walking between Hall 9 and Hall 12!) that took place at the Embedded World in Nuremburg just over a week ago, although I didn’t have much time to put my feet up as I came straight home to co-present a webinar about the new Cortex-R processors that ARM announced a few weeks prior to the show.

I’ve decided to pull together some of the key stories from the show and also highlight some new videos that ARM did throughout the week and are currently collected together under the Embedded World 2011 playlist on the ARMflix YouTube channel. Look the column on the right hand side for the new clips.

The show looked to be as big a success as ever especially for ARM and the vast array of ...