What started with standardised ARM processors is now the trend of the embedded industry, standardising on the ARM architecture rather than developing your own, writes Zeljko Loncaric
The embedded industry follows the general trends in electronics for smaller, less power-hungry and multicore devices. Lower power consumption and better energy efficiency, in particular, bring lots of advantages to the embedded world.
It’s not just the obvious benefit of longer battery runtimes with mobile and ultra-mobile devices; it’s also the enabling of fanless and sealed units in a hostile industrial or a sterile medical environment.
Comparing the typical power consumption of well above 10W for Intel’s current Atom chipset with HD capable graphics against a comparable ARM system typically not exceeding 2W explains the big boost ARM based systems have gained in the recent past.
While traditionally ARM based systems have been fully custom designed for their specific purpose, Intel took profit from the power of their general purpose CPUs with their standardised interfaces allowing their ecosystem to bring new designs quickly to the market.
A significant part of this success was the ability to use pre-integrated Computer-On-Modules (COMs) releasing the system developers from the painful task of having to design the tiny and tedious parts around processor and DDR-RAM by themselves. COMs are easy: They work, they save a lot of development time and they are scalable.
What started with standardised ARM processors is now the trend of the embedded industry – standardising on the well engineered ARM architecture rather than developing your own, but risky architectures. With few exceptions all major chip vendors now have ARM based processors in their product portfolio.
A perfect example is embedded legend Freescale’s brand new i.MX6 family which features on chip such standard PC interfaces like USB, PCI Express and Gigabit Ethernet as well as traditional industrial interfaces such as CAN.
The i.MX6 family is scalable from one to four ARM cores and comes with a sophisticated high-end, 3D-capable HD graphics interface. The outstanding embedded expertise of Freescale plus scalability and long term availability of the i.MX6 family make these processors the perfect choice for ARM-based COMs.
For instance, there is Qseven, a relatively new, but well established standard without a decade of Intel legacy. Qseven has been created to support very low-power platforms and to be open to further processor architectures.
With its 1.20 release dated September 2010 it was optimised early for dedicated ARM support, and the first Qseven based ARM COMs were introduced last year. Targeted industries are medical, automotive, industrial automation and, generally speaking, manufacturers of all kinds of mobile and ultra-mobile industrial devices.
Microsoft’s support for ARM with Windows 8 and the fact that more and more chip vendors are following the trend to ARM won’t make it easier for Intel to defend their home ground in the world of high performance general purpose embedded processors.
Zeljko Loncaric is marketing engineer at congatec
