Philips delivers industry's most advanced 90-nm ARM9 microcontroller

LPC3180 provides high computational power and low power consumption

January 31, 2006 -- Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) today announced the availability of the industry's first 90-nm ARM9-based microcontroller: the LPC3180. The new 32-bit MCU from Philips provides high performance with low power dissipation, and is the only ARM9 microcontroller that provides a vector floating-point co-processor and integrated USB On-The-Go, as well as the ability to operate in ultra-low-power mode down to 0.9V. With speeds of up to 208 MHz, the Philips LPC3180 is ideal for a wide range of high-precision applications such as point-of-sale (POS) equipment, medical and industrial devices, global positioning systems (GPS), and robotics.

"By taking advantage of state-of-the-art 90-nm process technology, Philips is able to offer the most advanced ARM9 MCU with high computational power, optimized for low-power operation," said Ata Khan, director of product innovation, microcontroller product line, Philips Semiconductors. "With the introduction of the LPC3180, even low-cost battery-powered devices can use ARM9. Embedded systems designers have fine-grained control over power management, so that power consumption can be tailored to support specific operational requirements."

The LPC3180 is the first microcontroller available in the Philips LPC3000 family, which is based on the popular, high-performance ARM926EJ-S core. The on-board MMU supports major operating systems including Linux, which is the leading embedded OS. The on-chip Java byte-code co-processor provides for basic security and authentication applications.

Flexible power management in the Philips LPC3180 allows high peak performance, especially for floating-point calculations, and allows shutting down the core power domain while retaining real-time clock and wake-up functionality. The new MCU is the only ARM9 microcontroller on the market today that offers a hardware vector floating-point unit for speed and efficiency. The hardware floating-point co-processor speeds up typical calculations by a factor of four to five in scalar mode and much more in optimized vector mode.

"We use ARM-based microcontrollers for computation-intensive applications that require extensive use of floating-point algorithms. The new ARM9-based microcontroller from Philips Semiconductors with on-chip hardware floating-point and low power consumption combines high computational performance with low power consumption in a manner that is attractive for our applications," said Mikhail Spitkovsky, group leader of electrical engineering, Symyx Technologies, Inc.

The LPC3180 is the first ARM9 MCU to offer USB On-The-Go (OTG) integrated with full host capability for direct connection to PDAs, smart-card readers and printers. The large array of peripherals available on-chip also include 7 UARTs, SPI, I2C, a real-time clock with a separate power domain, NAND Flash, and DDR memory controllers.

Availability
Samples of the Philips LPC3180 microcontroller will be available in March 2006. The development board with Linux will be demonstrated at Embedded World 2006 (booth number 12-566) in Nürnberg, Germany from February 14 to 16, 2006.

About Royal Philips Electronics
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of EUR 30.4 billion in 2005. With activities in the three interlocking domains of healthcare, lifestyle and technology and 159,200 employees in more than 60 countries, it has market leadership positions in medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring, color television sets, electric shavers, lighting and silicon system solutions. News from Philips is located at www.semiconductors.philips.com.