News and New Products

ARM's Cortex-R4 Configured for 3G Mobile Phones

By Richard Wilson -- Electronics Weekly, 5/15/2006

ARM has introduced its latest microprocessor in the Cortex family, a device with new configurability features aimed specifically at 3G mobiles and in-car electronic systems.  

The Cortex-R4 processor is based on a microarchitecture with dual instruction issue capability to deliver more than 600Dhrystone MIPS. It is a 90nm device based upon the ARM Artisan Advantage library.

The processor die is less than one square mm in area and the 90nm chip has a power consumption of less than 0.27mW/MHz

ARM has already secured three lead licensees for the Cortex-R4 including Broadcom, and the processor has received support from major EDA, RTOS and tools vendors.

The processor can be configured during synthesis to optimize the processor for different embedded applications through the memory protection unit, caches and tightly coupled memory.

According to the company, there is no compromising of the instruction set compatibility, which will help with software re-use.

“The embedded market is evolving rapidly as systems become more sophisticated and software workloads increase in computational size and complexity.” said John Cornish, marketing VP at ARM. “This latest member of our Cortex processor family gives chip designers unparalleled capabilities for the development of 3G phones, hard-disk drives, imaging and automotive systems.”

The higher performance Thumb-2 instruction set allows the processor to be used in place of the two separate processors that would traditionally be used in 3G baseband modems.

For automotive applications, the Cortex-R4 processor includes fault tolerance for critical safety applications as well as memory protection that supports the latest version of the OSEK real time operating system.

Electronics Weekly is the London-based sister publication of Electronic News.