ARM Announces ARM9E Processor

ARM has announced its new ARM9E processor core. The new core has been developed to address the growing range of applications that require a mix of control and digital signal processing (DSP) capability.

The ARM9E processor's trade-off between DSP and controller performance is difficult to achieve in a traditional system, which uses a separate DSP and microcontroller. Applications which will benefit from this enhanced signal processing capability include hard disk drives, digital video disk (DVD) drives, mobile telephony, modems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), Internet appliances, voice recognition, automotive and industrial control systems.

"The ARM9E core has been developed in response to the rapidly changing market dynamics and customer needs," said Guy Larri, CPU product manager, ARM. "The ARM9E core brings the benefits of ARM's high-performance, low-cost, power-efficient RISC architecture to applications that require both digital signal processing and control capability."

The ARM9E processor includes all ARM9TDMI core features, with the addition of signal processing extensions to the ARM instruction set. The new processor includes the ARM Thumb architecture extension, which reduces memory use by a third and achieves industry-leading code density for low system cost. The ARM9E processor is compatible with the ARM7 Thumb family, the ARM9 Thumb family, the StrongARM family and the ARM10 Thumb family processors, giving designers software-compatible processors with a range of price/performance points from 60 MIPS to 400 MIPS.

ARM, an intellectual property (IP) provider, licenses high-performance, low-cost, power-efficient RISC processors, peripherals, and system-chip designs to leading international electronics companies.