[-A very interesting article I found, find the autor below.]
Behind the Scenes in Mobile Chip Development
Posted by Chris Turner,
11 February 2011
The semiconductor companies that develop and manufacture these chips are some of the world’s biggest and I’m pleased to say that when it comes to processor development they have close relationships with us at ARM. Their resources are impressive; hundreds of talented scientists, designers and engineers working to develop each new chip that is introduced to handset and tablet manufacturers for use in their mobile products. But before these chip developments can commence they have to select and integrate processors which ARM’s engineers will in turn have been previously developing.
This is the case with the latest Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 processors which have just been developed by the ARM engineers. These highly complex processors necessitated substantial engineering investment in addition to the preceding architectural development and realization of the accompanying software and hardware tools, such as compilers and FPGA-based emulation platforms.
Credit is due to these engineering teams at ARM and everywhere in the ARM Partnership. They deliver breathtakingly innovative intellectual property and chip designs which take the mobile industry forward every year with new levels of performance, functionality and energy efficiency. As a result of this investment, users get sparkling applications, graphics, media, entertainment, Internet access, reliability and battery life, usually without giving any thought to the technology that makes these things possible. In fact, if you asked the average user to think about how these things work, they’d probably regard today’s Smartphone technology as magic!
The Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 real-time processors will provide the intelligence inside these ‘magic’ chips and it seems they are poised to set the standard in mobile communications for the latest 3G and new 4G products that will be introduced over the coming years. These real-time Cortex processors provide a roadmap for chip designers developing products for high performance mobile communications on leading operators’ cellular networks worldwide. They complement the ARM Cortex-A series processors that are tasked with running a rich operating system environment for users’ applications and media, putting ARM fairly and squarely at the heart of the mobile industry in both baseband and applications.
So, as we enjoy the buzz around our new processor announcements, I’d like to thank the engineers behind the scenes, both at ARM and at our silicon partners, whose leading-edge innovations make it possible to put the latest 3G and new 4G mobile technologies into the hands of consumers. It will be another year before I see any mobile products in the market that use the new Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 processors which ARM just announced, but they’ll be easy to spot because they’ll be Smartphones and tablets capable of delivering the magic of LTE communications to consumers.
Chris Turner, Product Marketing Manager, Processor Division, ARM, Chris works at ARM in the Processor Division's product marketing group where he manages the Cortex-R real-time processors. These processors deliver the enabling technology that runs communications inside mobile handsets and tablets - supporting the applications processor. If you just subscribed to an HSPA or LTE data service then you're almost certainly using a USB modem stick powered by these ARM Cortex-R processors. And, you'll find these same processors in just about every high performance hard disk drive, under the hood in automotive electronics and embedded in various other consumer and industrial applications. So, yes, you guessed it, he's into technology, knows his way around the semiconductor industry, understands computing, loves his job and never ceases to be amazed by the products and services that ARM delivers to users. Enjoy!
