Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
OptimoDE, an embedded signal processing core, is being unveiled today by ARM at the Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose.
Describing the technology as a “data engine”, Mike Muller, chief technology officer at ARM, said: “Today the processing requirements of consumer applications are outstripping the capabilities of the general-purpose DSP. This is forcing a shift to dedicated logic, which is time-consuming, expensive and inflexible.”
OptimoDE was developed from technology gained as part of the Adelante acquisition last summer. In some ways it is a response to the configurability and data processing capability of ARM’s rivals, such as Tensilica or ARC.
The data engines have a user-defined very long instruction word (VLIW) format, typically from 16 to 256-bits in length. Data path widths, execution units and I/O are all configurable, said ARM. Local storage, such as caches, and bus widths can also be defined, while the engines are designed to sit on the AMBA bus.
For designers, ARM is providing a library of IP, design tools, C compiler and a profiling tool. The latter allows the designer to best identify which parts of a system to implement in the data engine.
The smallest configuration of OptimoDE consumes 9,500 gates, said ARM. Devices already developed include a hearing aid processor, which achieves 21.5µW/MHz from 26,200 gates using 0.13µm processing. “A 128-point complex fast Fourier transform can be implemented in just 226 clock cycles and represents near-theoretical performance of the algorithm,” said ARM.
Also at the EPF, ARM unveiled a multi-processor core it has developed with NEC Electronics. MPCore is synthesisable, based around the ARMv6 instruction set and can have up to four processors.
The design can implement either symmetric or asymmetric multiprocessing, or a combination of the two. It can also handle multi-threaded applications. In its four-way version it can reach 2,600Mips, claimed ARM.
“Multi-processing can give system designers very high processing performance combined with low-power consumption,” said Muller. Processors can be shut down when not in use to conserve power.
NEC said it will use MPCore in consumer electronics, automotive and mobile products.
Both the OptimoDE and MPCore technologies are available for licensing, said ARM.
