First 90 nm ARM9 mirocontrollers

DSP, Micros & Memory

23 March 2005 DSP, Micros & Memory

Royal Philips Electronics has introduced the industry's first 90 nm ARM9 family-based 32-bit microcontrollers. The LPC3000 family is based on Philips' Nexperia platform and manufactured in the 90 nm process technology developed in the state-of-the-art 300 mm Crolles2 pilot facility. Philips shares this fab with Freescale and ST in Crolles, France.

By utilising 90 nm process technology and the ARM926EJ-S core, Philips says it is able to reduce manufacturing costs, decrease power dissipation and increase operating speeds of its advanced 32-bit MCU technology. The 90 nm technology allows for 1 V operation - reducing power dissipation nine times over 3 V devices. The ARM9 family also provides several power management benefits including the ability to go into a low-power state until an interrupt or debug request occurs. The LPC3000 family will feature a multilevel NAND Flash interface, allowing customers to use the highest density and lowest cost flash in the marketplace.

"The ARM9 family offers a number of features, including support for multiple interface options, which will enable companies such as Philips to develop higher-performance, lower-power MCUs," said John Cornish, director, product marketing, ARM.

"The 32-bit MCU market is set to grow from a $2,7 bn market in 2004 to a $6,7 bn market in 2009. With most of the major suppliers having an ARM licence, ARM-based MCUs will contribute largely to this market growth," said Brian Matas, vice president, market research, IC Insights.

The announcement of the ARM926EJ-S processor-based MCU family coincides with the announcement of the ARM RealView Developer Kit for Philips.

Philips' LPC3000 family products will operate at 200 MHz and feature a large array of standard communication peripherals to reduce system logic, thus reducing power and costs. These include up to seven UARTs, SPI, I²C, USB, realtime clock, the NAND Flash interface and others - such as Ethernet - to follow. The family also features a vector floating-point coprocessor for full support of single-precision and double-precision calculations at CPU clock speeds, which is important for signal processing applications such as motor control.

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DSP, Micros & Memory

First 90 nm ARM9 mirocontrollers

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