Any idea about ARM11 soft core license

In article , jade writes

Ask ARM?

-- \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/ /\/\/ snipped-for-privacy@phaedsys.org

You might also want to buy a Boing 747... Arm is VERY proud of their IP.

Or maybe an AVR32 is good enough?

Oh come on it's not as if he wants an Architecture license. Actually for the cost of a 747-400 (US$275 million) you could buy quite a bit of ARM itself.

Saying that if you have to ask how much a license costs you can probably can neither afford one nor afford the EDA tools you need to actually do anything with it or later on fabrication costs.

-p

I'd like to have a rough idea before contact to Sales.

Thanks.

and also MIPS cores, and you can get also licenses for NIOS from Altera...

How many devices will you make, and what is the target selling price ? What is 3-5% of that total ? Core licensors want as much revenue as they can get :)

-jg

If the target is an FPGA, then the Altera Nios II (or Xilinx Microblaze, if you prefer X to A) would be a much better solution than cores designed for hard macros in ASICs.

Another alternative hard core could be ColdFire.

I'd also talk to ARM sales about Single Use Design licenses. These are much cheaper than traditional ARM core licenses and give you exactly the same deliverables.

The restriction is that you are only allowed to use the IP in one design rather than as many as you like with a traditional term based license. However this doesn't sound like it would be a problem for you.

-p

I don't believe Atmel will license it - there isn't a second source for AVR8 either.

A single-use ARM license costs in the area of $300k to $400k, this would be ARM7 or ARM9. I'm not sure whether ARM11 is available as single-use. Standard licenses cost a few million depending on the core. You can trivially calculate the average license fee as $2M from ARM's financial reports.

If you're planning to do an ASIC then you're going to need at least $10M for the design, EDA tools, validation, masks and test/production runs. The core license cost is only a small part of the total cost of doing an ASIC.

If you're thinking of FPGA stuff then it is unlikely ARM11 is available for licensing, and in any case it you need several huge FPGA's - the FPGAs alone cost around $100K...

Wilco

No one is going to tell you openly in an NG. Also that is usually worked out by Snr management not the working engineers you usually find on here.

Hi Jade,

Just to be sure, that I understand what you are asking for:

Are you looking for an instruction set simulator? Are you looking for a cycle accurate instruction set simulator? or are you looking for an FPGA netlist of an ARM core? or for synthesizable RTL block or for something else?

Concerning instruction set simulators.

I'm not sure about the behaviour of the ARM RVDS instruction set simulators, but remember, that ARM11 simulators (about two years ago) were counting cycles not precisely enough to make accurate performance analysys for advanced multimedia applications.

At this time the only precise model, that existed was an RTL model of the ARM11, but these are normally too expensive and too slow to be useful.

The default ARM instruction set simulator gives you at least a rough idea of cycles / cache hits and cache misses and you can develop code before having Hardware with ARM11.

I don't know whether there's any reasonably development boards with ARM11 cores, but it may be a solution, that you try to get a board with an ARM11 on it.

This will give you precise results assuming the system has the same cache and memory architecture than your final system. If your memory system is different, well, then you'll have only estimates again.

bye

jade wrote: