ARM Community: SoC Design - ARM Community

ARM is heading to Multicore World 2012 to discuss ARM MPCore solutions and grow the development ecosystem in New Zealand.

If you were to ask most people what New Zealand is famous for, you’d probably hear it has more sheep than people, suggesting that the most that small country down-under can offer is open spaces and woolly clothing – how wrong.

Later this month, the balance will be put a little out of shape, starting on the 27th March for two days a number of international speakers and researchers and I will be taking time to specifically travel to New Zealand to address and participate within their growing community of businesses and technology innovators addressing the international challenge of multicore at Multicore World 2012.

ARM today has very little of its development ecosystem located in the southern hemisphere, however this opportunity to inform the community about the ARM MPCore solutions and vision was too good to be missed. As such, I will be travelling fr...

ARM Cortex-A7 processor…It's all about right-sized equipment.
In Part 1 of this blog we saw how right-sizing of air conditioning is vitally important because it performs three different functions simultaneously: Cooling, dehumidification and ventilation. Increases in efficiency could be obtained by separating out these three functions and optimizing them independently. As we saw last time, pumping air through ducts is inefficient due to the wasted pumping energy. You could use a hydronic system like a traditional underfloor heating system as is common in northern Europe, but with cooling in the ceiling as well as heating in the floor. Pumping water is a more efficient way to move energy than air. Even though the water pipe is physically smaller than an air duct, in terms of thermal energy transfer capacity it's a fatter pipe. But this wouldn't dehumidify or ventilate, so you'd still need a very small A/C system with air ducts to provide these functions. Duct size and pumping losses would be much lower than a pure ducted central air system though...

Recently I gave a keynote presentation at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University entitled “ARM Processor Evolution: Bringing High Performance to Mobile Devices”. In my talk I covered three main topics. First, how computing has evolved over the last 30 years from its desk bound origins to the ultra mobile world we know today. Second I talked about ARM’s role in that evolution and some of our early experiences of mobile devices. Finally, I spoke about some of the challenges I see ahead of us. In this blog I will give a recap of my presentation. Here in part 1 I’ll cover the history, and in part 2 look to the future.

Back to the 80’s
There is no doubt that personal computing has come a long way in the last 30 years. In my presentation I started by looking at the leading mobile devices from the early 80’s, namely the Osborne 1 and the Motorola DynaTAC. Launched in 1981, the Osborne 1 is widely recognized as the first portable computer. Weighing in at a solid 24.5lbs, it would be a brave man who carried that on a round-the-world business trip, esp...

In the previous three blogs (Parts 1, 2 and 3) I’ve outlined the background and key decisions involved in the development and implementation of the Elba testchip. Now we’ll look at the final steps taken to bring Elba to life.

As our understanding of the various components broadened, the actual SoC architecture design activity then knew the details it needed in order finalize the design. We knew we had two Cortex-A9 macros, a Mali GPU and the various other components, but not too much about how we would best plug them together. Since we also wanted to investigate system level power management, many of the large system components were also placed into their own independent power domains. The layout of the design also became rather ...

The 48th DAC was held in San Diego this year and whenever DAC is not in Silicon Valley there is always a concern about how many people are going to show up. Fortunately the sun shone on San Diego and there seemed to be a good number of people in attendance.

This year, for only the second time in history, there was an ARM booth at DAC. In previous years we have shown demos within our partners’ booths but this year we had our own space as well as working with our partners as usual. One of the messages we were promoting at DAC the need for a complete system solution approach to design, as opposed a collection of components designed in isolation of each other. We call this Smarter Systems Solutions and John Heinlein gave a presentation on this subject on the Chip Estimate booth. During DAC, ARM also ...

Are you using a mobile device? Chances are you’re probably reading this blog post on one. You’re also probably reading this with the confidence that your device is doing what you intend it to do. As consumers, we place a lot of demands on not only our mobile devices but also the rest of our personal electronics. We want them to perform all sorts of tasks efficiently, accurately, and with minimal power consumption. As an engineer, you’re aware of the complex embedded SoC’s used in your device to make sure that it does what’s intended. Today’s embedded SoC’s are high performance, heterogeneous, and multi-processing systems.

In the future, most of these embedded SoC’s are likely to contain multiple caches that share a single memory resource. At a high level, cache coherency means that two caches cannot have same cache line in a dirty state and that if a cache contains a cache line in a unique state, that line must not be in another cache. In addition, at least one transaction must always be able make forward progress (no deadlock.) To prevent these cache coherency issues, ARM has included cache coherence extensions in their AMBA 4 protocol specification.

While this is a tremendou...