ARM and MIPS – The RISC Brothers
Perhaps 2 of the most famous RISC architectures, ARM, and MIPS, have been around for years. Like many well designed architectures, they continue to be adapted, enhanced, and used in litterally billions of devices.
Recently Altera (maker of FPGAs and CPLD’s) licensed the use of the MIPS32 core. This is a first for MIPS, as they now join ARM, and PowerPC as major cores available in FPGAs. Source: EETimes
On the topic of ARM, they have been working extensively recently with GlobalFoundries to provide customers with proven IP, specifically the ARM Cortex-A9. They are developing as a SoC core on a 28nm process. ARM currently works with TSMC to test, and prove various cores on TSMC’s process, and now will do so with GlobalFoundries. What this does in enable system builders to have IP blocks that are PROVEN on a given manufacturing node. It takes some of the guess work, and certainly risk, out of developing a ASSP, ASIC, or SoC.
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Processor Manufacturers, Processor News
