The expansion of the internet of things (IoT) is driving demand for a wide variety of chips to be embedded in a huge range of devices. Some of these will require fully fledged processors and operating systems, though operating at very low power, but even greater volumes will rest with microcontrollers for more basic gadgets and sensors. Even these will, in many cases, need higher performance to support new applications, and ARM has beefed up its Cortex-M microcontroller IP platform to address this need.
Its latest core is the Cortex-M7, which boosts the 32-bit microcontroller’s capabilities when translating data from sensors into digital information. It doubles the compute and DSP performance of the current M4 offerings while reducing power consumption, thanks to the 28nm manufacturing process, and is also more powerful than the Cortex-R family. The M7 will be able to support embedded devices with voice control or graphical interfaces and can also be used within smartphones or cars to drive more complex audio and touch display functions.
The design is targeted in particular at the intensive real time processing applications found in some industrial and automotive settings, and at some smart home gateways. It has already been adopted by several chip suppliers, including STMicro, Atmel and Freescale, said the UK company, which sees the M-class family as its next big growth platform, because of the huge volumes associated with the emerging IoT.
The M7 supports 64-bit data transfer and can execute two instructions in parallel, which will be important for markets where instantaneous response to changing conditions is required, such as lighting management. In many such cases, a collection of small microcontrollers could be replaced with a single M7, said ARM.
The design runs a real time operating system, which improves latency rates tenfold compared to a full OS. It will push the Cortex-M family, which has already powered 8bn microcontrollers and embedded chips over the past decade, into higher end applications, providing a lower power, lower latency option in the area where microcontrollers can start to overlap with microprocessors.