It’s a brave company that takes on the mighty ARM in low power processor IP cores, but many believe there will be a greater variety of suppliers in the IoT. French firm Cortus is one of those hoping to take advantage of the diversity of that evolving market, with a “minimalist” approach to cores for embedded devices.
The 10-year old company traditionally competes with the ARM Cortex M0 microcontroller platform and has 38 licensees for its ultra-small 32-bit processor cores. Now it has announced a new instruction set, and two ‘v2’ cores, targeted at intelligent devices which are connected to one another and/or the internet, and need extremely low power coupled with high levels of security.
Of course, low power consumption and good security are also claimed as strong suits for ARM’s microprocessor and microcontroller (MCU) platforms, and the UK company last week signalled its determination to repeat its smartphone victory in the IoT, with the launch of its souped-up MCU, Cortex-M7, and its new embedded operating system, mBed OS.
However, Cortus’s VP of sales and marketing, Roddy Urquhart, believes there will be opportunities for a wider range of architectures and suppliers in the IoT. The common features will be support for sensors, various short-range connectivity options, and some processing on a “minimalist” system-on-chip (SoC). However, he thinks there will be less need for standardization, and designs will be optimized for different purposes.
Also, the priority in mobile devices has been to drive down the geometries (Intel is pushing to 10nm), because the designs were mainly digital. “In the new wave of connected devices, designs will be based on mixed-signal and sensors-on-chip. That means coarser nodes, so there will be another area of discontinuity with the mobile wave, in manufacturing technology.”
And where there is discontinuity, there is the chance for smaller players to steal share. The French firm has introduced two new cores, the APS23 and APS25, based on its new instruction set, and supports the familiar model of licensing fees plus royalties. The new chips use some of the proven technologies from the existing v1 family, which will still be marketed, but v2 has greater code density to address the demanding power and size requirements of the IoT. That is coupled with a smaller instruction memory to help with power efficiency.
The APS23 is the simpler product and targets always on/always listening systems and connectivity options with lower clock frequencies such as Bluetooth Low Energy. The APS25 core is aimed at embedded systems that need more computational performance and system complexity. It can support multicore designs and an interface for various coprocessors to handle demanding tasks.
The coprocessor interface, and various security mechanisms, are important differentiators from ARM and Imagination’s MIPS. Urquhart also says licensees are often attracted by the greater flexibility of Cortus’s licensing terms, which allow customers the ability to add their own “secret sauce”, under approval, to the cores, especially in the security area where the company has several specific licensees. The coprocessor interface allows customers to add and design specific algorithms while giving them full access to CPU registers. One such user is BlackBerry’s Certicom security unit, which used Cortus’s extendible instruction set to couple a security mechanism tightly with a CPU.
There will be more commentary on Cortus and the widening IoT processor ecosystem in the coming edition of Rethink’s weekly subscription research newsletter, Wireless Watch. Please email Caroline Gabriel ([email protected]) for details and a trial issue.