San Jose, Calif. — Claimed to be the first 90-nm ARM926EJ-S-based MCU, the LPC3180 from Royal Philips Electronics integrates a vector floating-point coprocessor and the USB On-The-Go functionality and provides the ability to operate in ultra-low-power mode down to 0.9V. Targeted applications include point-of-sale (POS) equipment, medical and industrial devices, global positioning systems (GPS), and robotics.
The LPC3180 operates at over 200 MHz CPU frequency; about 220 MIPS according to ARM Inc., thanks to the ARM926EJ-S core. The core incorporates a 5-stage pipeline and has a Harvard architecture with separate 32 KB instruction and data caches, a demand paged MMU, DSP instruction extensions with a single cycle MAC, and Jazelle Java byte-code execution hardware.
"With the introduction of the LPC3180, even low-cost battery-powered devices can use ARM9. Embedded systems designers have fine-grained control over power management, so that power consumption can be tailored to support specific operational requirements," said Ata Khan, director of product innovation, microcontroller product line, Philips Semiconductors. Flexible power management in the LPC3180 allows high peak performance, especially for floating-point calculations, and allows shutting down the core power domain while retaining real-time clock and wake-up functionality, he noted.
The MCU is said to be the only ARM9 microcontroller on the market today that offers a hardware vector floating-point coprocessor (VFP9) for speed and efficiency. The coprocessor speeds up typical calculations by a factor of four to five in scalar mode and much more in optimized vector mode. The floating-point unit provides full support for single-precision and double-precision add, subtract, multiply, divide, and multiply-accumulate operations at CPU clock speeds. It is compliant with the IEEE 754 standard. and enables advanced motor control and DSP applications.
The VFP9 has three separate pipelines for floating-point MAC operations, divide or square root operations, and load/store operations. These pipelines can operate in parallel and can complete execution out of order. All single-precision instructions, except divide and square root, take one cycle and double-precision multiply and multiply-accumulate instructions take two cycles. The VFP9 also provides format conversions between floating-point and integer word formats.
The LPC3180’s on-board MMU supports major operating systems including Linux, which is the leading embedded OS. The on-chip Java byte-code co-processor provides for basic security and authentication applications. Another first for ARM9-based MCUs is the USB On-The-Go (OTG) integrated with full host capability for direct connection to PDAs, smart-card readers and printers. The MCU also incorporates an SDRAM interface, NAND flash interfaces, USB 2.0 full-speed interface, 7 UARTs, two I2C interfaces, two SPI ports, a Secure Digital (SD) interface, a Memory Stick interface, and a 10-bit A/D converter, in addition to many other features.
The MCU utilizes the multi-layer AHB (Advanced High-performance Bus) to interface the CPU to its peripherals. The AHB provides a separate bus for each AHB master, including both an instruction and a data bus for the CPU, two data buses for the DMA controller, and another bus for the USB controller. There are no arbitration delays unless two masters attempt to access the same slave at the same time.
For more details on the Philips MCU, see block diagram below.
See related image
The Philips LPC3180 is priced at $7.10 USD in quantities of 10,000 and samples will be available in March 2006. The development board with Linux will be demonstrated at Embedded World 2006 (booth number 12-566) in Nuremberg, Germany from February 14 to 16, 2006.
Philips Semiconductors 1-800-447-1500
www.semiconductors.Philips.com.
