ARM Unveils New AMBA System IP For Low Power and Media Rich SoC Designs

Major upgrades and new products enable rapid deployment of Cortex and Mali processors into media rich, web-enabled systems

CAMBRIDGE, UK - October 21, 2009 - ARM [(LSE: ARM); (Nasdaq: ARMH)] today announced the launch of new system IP products from the ARM® AMBA® family: the AMBA Network Interconnect with Advanced Quality of Service, a new Dynamic Memory Controller, and the Verification and Performance Exploration tool.  These significant additions to the AMBA family further accelerate ARM Partners' time to market for lower power, higher performance ARM processor-based SoCs.  

The AMBA Network Interconnect (NIC-301) with advanced QoS (QoS-301) delivers the richest media experience from ARM Cortex™ CPUs, Mali™ GPUs and Video processors and is optimized to balance low latency with guaranteed bandwidth.  Interconnect QoS boosts web browsing performance by up to 30 percent, providing consumers with enhanced responsiveness, considerably reducing the time taken from click to view. 

The widely licensed AMBA Dynamic Memory Controller (DMC-342) family has been extended to support LPDDR2 memories with their higher bandwidth, lower power and reduced pin-count characteristics.  The DMC-342 manages memory power modes to reduce system level power consumption. QoS-based traffic management within DMC-342 optimizes the efficiency of shared memory access, servicing high bandwidth GPUs while meeting maximum latency guarantees for real-time masters.

The new AMBA Verification and Performance Exploration (VPE-301) tool enables the creation of 'what if' scenarios to explore the performance of subsystems comprising ARM Cortex processors, Mali GPUs and customer IP prior to software or silicon availability. VPE-301 substitutes RTL with components that generate statistical AMBA AXI™ traffic profiles, and has been proven to reduce simulation times by more than 90 percent while maintaining data-path accuracy. With VPE-301, system architects can evaluate many more design configurations, ensuring they reach a solution with optimal performance.

"The drive to constrain product costs and power consumption represents a major challenge for system designers, particularly with external memory bandwidth," said Michael Dimelow, director of marketing, Processor Division, ARM. "To increase performance, designers need to focus on the efficient use of this memory bandwidth.  This drives the need both for system IP that intelligently manages traffic between the masters and memory sub-system, and tools that aid analysis of the system dynamics ahead of silicon."

Availability

All of these products are available for licensing from ARM today.

A white paper "Traffic Management for Optimizing Media-Intensive SoCs" is available. Click here

About AMBA & CoreSight

The ARM AMBA and CoreSight™ families of products deliver a range of system IP and tools to optimize ARM Cortex and Mali processor-based SoC designs. The product portfolio comprises network interconnect, SoC level debug and trace, dynamic memory and cache controller IP along with the configuration and performance exploration tools necessary to accelerate time to market. The AMBA and CoreSight families of products have been licensed by all leading semiconductor companies and are widely deployed across all consumer electronics product markets. These latest additions to the AMBA family raise the bar in both performance and ease of use. For more information: http://www.arm.com/products/solutions/fabric_overview.html

About ARM

ARM designs the technology that lies at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. ARM's comprehensive product offering includes 32-bit RISC microprocessors, graphics processors, video engines, enabling software, cell libraries, embedded memories, high-speed connectivity products, peripherals and development tools. Combined with comprehensive design services, training, support and maintenance, and the company's broad Partner community, they provide a total system solution that offers a fast, reliable path to market for leading electronics companies. More information on ARM is available at http://www.arm.com.