| Oki enters general purpose ARM9 SoC market |
Oct. 20, 2004
 Oki Semiconductor will sample in mid-November its first general-purpose SoCs (system-on-chips) based on ARM9 cores. The Advantage Microcontroller line targets USB 2.0 storage devices, MP3 players, and set-top boxes. It also provides a migration path for customers using 16-bit and low-end 32-bit uCs (microcontrollers).
(Click for larger view of Advantage development board)
The Advantage line comprises two families:- The 6200 series (ML696200) is a general-purpose ARM9 SoC targeting USB 2.0-based consumer peripherals and ATA/Flash storage devices.
- The 6500 series (ML69Q6500) adds sound and targets hard drive-based audio player and recording applications
Both the 6200 and the 6500 series are based on an ARM946E-S RISC core, clocked up to 120MHz, with 8KB each of instruction and data cache.
In addition to 32-bit ARM9 instructions, the core supports Thumb instructions, a subset of 32-bit ARM recoded in 16-bits to support legacy microcontroller applications.
The core lacks an MMU, instead offering a "memory protection unit" (MPU), which enables memory partitioning with individual protection attributes and overlapping memory region protection. Unlike an MMU, the MPU cannot translate addresses, and thus cannot support "complex" OSes such as full Linux or Windows CE. uClinux should work fine, though, and Oki says it is in the process of arranging for a uClinux port to the Advantage SoCs.
The ARM946E-S core also includes signal processing extensions, and supports a third-party | | | |
