Embedded.com Tech Focus Newsletter (9-22-14): Meeting the challenges of nextgen ARM SoC design

For the latest information and intensive grounding in the complexities of system-on-chip design using ARM cores, the one resource embedded system developers can depend on is the ARM Technical Conference

Lessons learned in addressing the transfer of low power IP designs and implementation flows and methodologies into energy-efficient System-on-Chip products for use by various ARM processor core lisencees.

VirtualSoC, a new virtual platform prototyping framework based on QEMU and SystemC that does full-system simulation of an ARM based heterogeneous system-on-chip.

The design of an IEEE-754 compliant FPU for use with a ARM Cortex-M1 processor on FPGA SoCs that makes use of an AMBA-based decoupled FPU that is shared among different cores in an MPSoC design.

An analysis of how effective asymmetric multiprocessor designs using ARM's big.LITTLE architecture based on the Cortex-A7 and -A15 are in balancing between high performance and energy efficiency.

Using the ARM Accelerated coherency port (ACP ) to deal with cache coherency issues when building a MPCore implementation using the Xilinx Zynq all-programmable SoC.

A power estimation tool for use with RISC based designs that estimates power with less than 3% error for ARM940T processors 3.5% for ARM CortexA8 processor-based system and is faster than state-of-the-art power estimation tools.

An evaluation of the use of a heterogeneous quad-core Cortex A9 ARMv7 processor based design as an alternative to the X86 architecture, in high energy physics applications

The authors describe the development of a self-checking, result-signalling, tester pattern version of the popular Dhrystone benchmark.

How Texas Instruments' designers used the SystemC hardware design language to do performance modeling when creating both the company's OMAP-2 platform and the devices based on it.

In a three part series, Achim Nohl describes using the Synopsys Virtualizer Development Kit (VDK) to do early hardware/software co-development of handset hardware running the Android software platform.

Michael Parker of Altera Corp. describes how to use an ARM/FPGA-based SoC for real-time machine control algorithm operations. He also describes how the SoC can function as a network processor to link up to the real-time network protocols used in many industrial automation applications.

When, where, and why embedded developers should consider a single- chip SoC processor as alternative to a general- purpose microcontroller.