Cortus announces bridges for AHB-Lite and APB to enable migration to APS and FPS processor product range

DRESDEN, GERMANY: Cortus, a technology leader in ultra low power, silicon efficient 32-bit processor IP, announces the release of two bridges for their processor product range. The first bridge is between the Cortus APS bus and AHB-Lite while the second bridge is between the APS bus and APB.

The Cortus family of processors are supported by the highly efficient, low latency APS bus. This bus provides high speed interfacing between the Cortus processors and synchronous SRAM. The bus is also supported by Cortus’ family of peripherals. Nevertheless, many companies have existing investments in peripherals that use AHB or APB. Furthermore many older 32 bit processor cores make use of the AHB-Lite bus.

“We recognise that many IC designers have already invested in peripherals using AHB-Lite and APB” said Michael Chapman, CEO and president of Cortus. “We are pleased to ensure that licensees of Cortus’ low power, silicon efficient cores can protect their existing investment in peripherals.

“The new Cortus bridge products enable licensees of APS3 or FPS6 to cleanly interface to existing AHB and APB subsystems. Then new bridges also enable a smooth migration of existing subsystems based on older microcontroller cores to Cortus microcontroller cores. C and C++ rather than a particular instruction set are the industry standards for embedded systems.”

“All modern 32-bit cores support C and C++ and the main challenge to migrating designs lies in peripherals for which hardware-dependent software must be written”. In modern system-on-chip applications there is virtually no processor-specific code. The new bridges will enable drop-in replacement of older cores by efficient Cortus ones, the main issue for licensees will be writing the interrupt handler.”

The Cortus microcontroller core family includes the highly efficient APS3 and the high performance FPS6 with further cores due for release later in 2012. The APS3 offers the best performance in the industry in terms of DMIPS/mW and DMIPS/mm2 and has been licensed for low power applications such as Bluetooth LE, touchscreen controllers and SIM cards. The FPS6 provides high throughput floating point computation for applications such as motor control and floating point signal processing.

The ecosystem around the Cortus microcontroller cores is rich and well developed, and it includes peripherals commonly used in embedded systems, bus bridges to ensure easy interfacing to other IP and system support and functions such as caches. A full development environment (for C and C++) is available, which can be customised and branded for final customer use. For the most demanding designs the FPS6 can be used in a multi-core configuration.