ARM processors

Adam Hoover
 ARM processors
What is it?
Family of 32-bit microcontroller processors

Who makes it?

ARM has changed their name several times:

Acorn RISC Machines (1985)

Advanced RISC Machines (1990)
ARM Holdings (1998)

What is its niche?

Mid-high level complexity hand-held consumer electronics

PDA’s (1980’s)
Cell phones (1990’s)
Handheld game devices (2000’s)
 Example Consumer Products

Nintendo DS Apple Ipod

TASC ChessMachine

Gameboy advance
Apple Iphone
Apple Newton PDA
 Processor design, not a chip

Core design
Chip design & fabrication

ARM licenses core designs to other companies

OEMs can customize chips

ARM provides compilers, development tools,

and debugging tools for chip development
and product development
Nintendo DS
ARM chips (examples)
 ARM processor features
ARM1 (1985) to ARM11 and Cortex lines, most having 5+ flavors

ARM7 cores
• Small number of transistors (~35,000)
• No microcode, all instructions hard-wired (no flexibility in ISA)
• 3-stage pipeline (simple fetch-decode-execute)
• 4-8 KB cache memory, typically unified (data/instruction)
• 32-bit ISA (not used for simple control stuff)
• 18-56 MHz clock speed

ARM extensions
• “Thumb” instruction set – 16 bit ISA packed into 32-bit code
• “Jazelle” instruction set – java code executed in hardware (instead of JVM)
ARM assembly code is dense
C program code:
while (i != j)
{
if (i > j)
i -= j;
else
j -= i;
}

ARM assembly code:

loop CMP Ri, Rj ; set condition "NE" if (i != j)
; "GT" if (i > j), or "LT" if (i < j)
SUBGT Ri, Ri, Rj ; if "GT", i = i-j
SUBLT Rj, Rj, Ri ; if "LT", j = j-I
BNE loop ; if "NE", then loop

multiple pieces of work per instruction

 ARM chip pricing
Core licensing – $200,000 to $10,000,000 depending

Some chip examples:

Atmel AT91SAM family -- $3/unit qty 10,000 (2005)
NXP LPC24xx family -- $8-14/unit qty 1 (2009)
Texas Instruments MS470 family - $10-22/unit qty 1 (2009)

For further pricing, check www.digikey.com

For further information, see www.arm.com