ARM announces new higher performance,
low power ARM9 processor architecture

The ARM9 family extends ARM's processor roadmap, enabling a wide range of next generation designs, including cell phones, pagers, smart phones and set-top boxes. The ARM9TDMI is the base processor core, while the ARM940T adds features which improve system performance and utility. The ARM9TDMI offers more than twice the performance of an ARM7TDMI processor core. Currently, the ARM7TDMI is the processor of choice for extremely power-sensitive, high performance applications such as digital cellular phones. The ARM9TDMI will meet designers' demands for a low-power, higher performance processor for high-end multiprocessing applications, such as smart phones.

"The introduction of ARM9 fortifies our performance roadmap between the ARM7, ARM8 and StrongARM and offers OEMs, standardizing on the ARM family, a wider choice in performance, power and die size," said Robin Saxby, ARM president and CEO. "ARM9 also extends the success of our extremely popular Thumb technology, giving our semiconductor partners and their customers the competitive advantage they need."

"As one of the leading vendors of embedded ARM7TDMI applications, with extensive experience applying it to many different products, Symbios Logic is ready to take the next step and integrate the ARM9TDMI processor into its core library," said Tom Lagatta, vice president of marketing and business development for Symbios Logic. We are anticipating using the increased performance of the ARM9 for future products, including high performance I/O, mass storage, storage management, imaging and other peripheral applications. Our OEM customers will be the ultimate beneficiaries of ARM9 technology as they gain competitive advantage in their markets."

"The ARM9 allows VLSI to offer the next generation of performance to our current customer base," said Ray Slusarczyk, director of marketing for VLSI's Embedded Processor Group. "The approaches taken by ARM in implementing the new core are effective in allowing us to more quickly embed the ARM9 in our ASIC and ASSP product offerings. This reduces our development time and ultimately means that our customers can get their products to market more quickly. The new ARM9 core is another reason why VLSI values its long and productive relationship with ARM."

ARM9 Features

The ARM940T adds separate instruction and data caches to the two memory data buses for reduced access time to both instructions and data. The ARM940T also contains a write buffer and a new protection unit designed specifically for embedded operations. This new protection unit requires no address translation and contains eight individually programmable instruction and data protection regions. These can be specified as to base address, region size, and cache/buffer properties. During debug, the ARM940T provides full debug access to the state of the protection unit registers and to the contents of the caches.

In addition, the ARM940T is fully AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture) compliant. AMBA is a standard on-chip ASIC bus allowing rapid modular design of low power systems while simplifying design reuse and test. ARM also provides a library of macrocell peripherals which conform to the AMBA standard for easy ASIC development. By using AMBA with synthesized versions of the peripherals, system hardware and software can be prototyped early in the design cycle, thereby reducing the risk of design faults in the final system.

Both ARM9 products are supported by the ARM Software Development Toolkit version 2.11 (SDT2.11), modeling and simulation support and a PID development board which implements AMBA.

Technical Details

• ARM9TDMI includes 5-stage pipeline (fetch, decode, shifter/arithmetic logic unit (ALU), cache and write-back), Thumb, Debug, Harvard buses.
• ARM940T includes ARM9TDMI + 4KB instruction + 4KB data caches, write buffer, AMBA bus interface, flexible memory protection unit, external coprocessor support.
• Write buffer provides an 8 data word and 4 address capacity.
• The protection unit consists of 8 variable size instruction regions, as well as 8 independent, variable size data protection regions.
• Predicted die size for the ARM9TDMI is 4mm2 based on 0.35-micron design rules and 3-layer metal.
• Predicted die size for the ARM940T is 15mm2 based on 0.35-micron design rules and 3-layer metal.
• Predicted clock frequency for both devices is approximately 150MHz, with a predicted MIPS rate of 165 @ 150MHz.
• Power consumption for the ARM9TDMI is 1.5 mW of power per MHz at 2.5 volts.
• Power consumption for the ARM940T is 4.5 mW of power per MHz at 3 volts.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing is established by the ARM partner licensees and is based on the customer's specific system-level design requirements. Symbios Logic has licensed the ARM9TDMI and ARM940T cores, which are currently available in their ASIC library.

VLSI Technology will offer customers both the ARM9TDMI and ARM940T as cores available to embed in Customer Specific IC development efforts. They will also incorporate the cores in VLSI's internal product development efforts.

A future ARM9 product will extend the protection unit in the ARM940T to include a full memory management unit (MMU). This will enable the ARM9 to be implemented as a stand-alone microprocessor.

Advanced RISC Machines (ARM)

For more information, visit the ARM website at http://www.arm.com

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