Tuesday, March 13, 2012

ARM Announces Ultra Low Power Cortex-M0+

Today ARM introduced the Cortex-M0+ as the "world's most energy-efficient processor" in a press release.  Both Freescale and NXP have announced they will license the core in today's press releases that coincide with ARM's announcement.



Freescale is introducing the Kinetis L series as the first microcontroller to be built on the Cortex-M0+.
They list some new features of the ore including reducing the pipeline to two stages, single-cycle access to I/O, faster access to program memory, linear address space and a micro trace buffer.  Freescale has functional silicon today according to the following YouTube video.


NXP's announcement talks about the success they have had with the predecessor Cortex-M0 core.  They currently have the lowest power Cortex-M0 at 110uA/MHz, licensing the new Cortex-M0+ will enable them to continue to offer the lowest power ARM processors.  The new license is part of NXP's strategy to offer the widest range of ARM solutions as you can see in this interview.

No comments: