New microprocessor architecture

Sounds like a Bill Gates statement... "Nobody needs more than 640KB of memory".

The cost of the license is not connected to the cost of the development other than providing enough money to keep the company afloat. The will charge as much as the market will bear which means they can extract a significant percentage of the development cost from each licensee. In the end they get many more times their costs back in fees.

In terms of a company duplicating the ARM ISA, I think it may well be cheaper to do that than to license the core. By copying you avoid all the costs of inventing the ISA, working with tool vendors (or even paying them) for tool development and all the other costs that ARM has. But you can only get this advantage if you copy the ISA of an existing MCU like the ARM.

Of course you could go with an open source CPU like the one from Lattice. No license fees, no royalties and you have to do all the real work yourself!

An FPGA into which we can shovel the core as well as peripherals that used to be off-chip in a fairly large ASIC.

We're going to a one-chip solution instead of a 2-4 chip solution. Spending NRE to reduce RE. The ARM7 part was also being discontinued, so we were going to have to change anyway. We've since been told by the ARM7 vendor that they've changed their mind and are not disconinuing the part.

Actually the fact that it was ARM didn't matter. We were looking for a peripheral set. Pretty much any 32-bit processor running at 20-50 MHz would be fine (ARM, PPC, SPARC, etc.).

GCC and eCos. GCC and eCos will build for at least a dozen target architectures. eCos for both targets is built from the same source tree. Right now we've got two different gcc source trees, but that's just because the ARM toolchain is a couple years old and the NIOS one is a little newer.

Once the device drivers for the peripherals were working, it took about two days to intially port the apps. It'll probably another week or two of testing and fixing minor problems).

I don't think so. In my experience, what matters is the peripheral set and the availability of development tools. Given an appropriate peripheral set and OS/toolchain, we could just as easily be using any of four or five other 32-bit CPU cores.

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  These PRESERVES
                                  at               should be FORCE-FED to
                               visi.com            PENTAGON OFFICIALS!!

Its impossible to patent what no one needs .

CPU's are fast to change , even faster

is software . Software change forces

even better , more competitive H/W .

CPU's have been highly regulated , thus

evolution was slow , thank to Intel crony .

But now the consumer is getting better ,

for the wide competition of ARM cpu .

There are no shortages of RAM ,ROM

and inspite of C/C++ and linux and M$

those who need good software are using

it now . Dont expect them to advert' it ,

nor try to sell it to the public , it would

work against their interest .

Hardware makers are hoping their software

will "lock" the consumer into buying the

pdt . If the software runs on another

box , they may only sell one box , softwa

is carried to their competitors box ,

and they go bankrupt .

As competition gets stronger , ppl give

away free software ...

Patents and copyrights become a joke .

M$ only had a copyright as long as Intel

had control on CPU's ..

Linux will be history soon ..

I am the worlds fastest systems programmer . I will "borrow" Nintendo DS BIOS and then rewrite it and slim it down and put a perfectly structured OpSys on top of that and ..

Give it free .

Because it nix's all the difficulties of programming , it will be used by all . No files nor folders , kernel organizes everything for you , and to boot has total control over every thread and object , thus impossible to virus , worm ...

I can see the motivation, but is it really a one chip solution ? Most FPGA designs are 3 chips : FPGA device, Loader Memory, and Code memory. Yes, Loader memory is often small, and in the newest Xilinx devices it's in the package, but the code memory is more of an issue, as that's wider.

Or did you mean 'One complex chip', or 'one chip to learn' ?

- as one could say the support memory devices are largely invisible from a devlopment viewpoint.

Who was the ARM vendor ?

I've seen that flip-flop before, but usually the continued part also moves into 'maint pricing' columns.

-jg

I meant that 1 chip is replacing 2-4 other chips that provided CPU+peripherals. There are still external SDRAM, flash, and some other parts that are pretty much the same in both the old and new designs.

Code memory is still required. Both old/new designs have 8MB of external SDRAM and 4MB of external flash. Going to an FPGA merely allowed us to incorporate a couple previously external ASICs.

Samsung.

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I'm in direct contact
                                  at               with many advanced fun
                               visi.com            CONCEPTS.

That is always a risk. On the other hand, if you file early then a lot of details will change and by the time you are ready to go to market a few years down the line, the patent is published and competitors can try to work around it. In my experience most patents are filed when a project goes to market.

IP includes things like ISA and micro architecture, which are made public. ARM is effectively selling the ISA and so needs to protect it.

The ARM2 was popular in the UK in personal computers in the early

90's and its performance advantage over 68000 and 80(2)86 was what caught Apple's attention. ARM2 volumes were never great. But would ARM Ltd have been created if Apple could have cloned the ARM2?

ARM7 may still be a popular choice as an MCU, but the fact is that ARM7 licensing has slowed down significantly in the last few years. Licensing revenue for ARM7 is about $24m in 2002 vs $6m in 2006. There are already 217 ARM9 licenses vs 145 ARM7 licenses. In terms of the 2.5b shipments in 2006, 60% was ARM7, 40% ARM9. In 2007 ARM9 is likely to overtake ARM7 in volume.

Yes, with 1.5 billion shipments last year ARM7 is still the most popular CPU on earth. But for how much longer?

Wilco

If you have improvements to a filed patent, that patent application can be ammended or a new one submitted for the "new" inventions. It is a fools game to delay patent applications.

ISA can not be directly protected by patents or copyright, only trade secret. Since it must be made public other means must be used to protect a feature that is required by the ISA. In this case patent is the only practical means of protection.

You tell me, my crystal ball is broken.

Again, is your crystal ball working better than mine?