ARM Community: SoC Design - ARM Community

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if we....” That’s the way many step changes have started in ARM. In the next four blogs I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about just one of those, we called it “The Elba Program”. The Elba program is just coming to its end, but its effect is starting to be seen in various places across the web as new markets and devices are starting to appear.

First, a very basic history lesson. ARM processors really took off as the processor that powered the first mobile phones. Phones as I’m sure you know need to be turned on to receive a call, and until more recently most calls were fairly short in comparison to the time a phone sat in what was called standby mode. This requirement quickly became the dominant characteristic for embedded processors and drove an entire branch of the semiconductor industry to look at manufacturing devices that consumed as little energy as possible when in standby at the cost of higher energy consumption when active. At the fabrication level, this technology gained a geometry label “LP” (low power), to differentiate it from the “G” (generic) process that was used by the more general purpose microprocessors.
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