CSR licences advanced ARM Cortex MPU technology

CAMBRIDGE, UK: ARM and CSR plc have signed a major licensing agreement for the ARM Cortex-A5 MPCore and Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processors.

CSR intends to target the advanced technology towards strengthening its leadership position in providing location-aware SoC platforms for In-Vehicle Navigation and Infotainment and Portable Navigation Device (PND) markets and for new, emerging location-aware consumer device markets, especially in the fast growing economies of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries.

"This licensing agreement expands our existing ARM processor portfolio, and is a clear demonstration of our commitment to enhance consumer experience with our platforms by investing in leading edge IP," said Kanwar Chadha, chief marketing officer, CSR. "We are now positioned to fully respond to market needs by exploiting the total potential of ARM powered system-on-chip solutions for next generation consumer devices and automotive systems."

"The scalability of both processors provides the flexibility for us to optimize the performance for each application within a low power footprint," added Babak Bastani, VP of Global Chip Design, CSR. "Combining our state of the art location and connectivity expertise with two software-compatible processors, based on the standard ARM architecture will enable us to reduce our development costs while delivering leading edge products to market in a timely manner."

"This latest agreement with a global leader in wireless connectivity and location markets demonstrates the continued market momentum for the ARM Cortex-A series processors and ARM MPCore technology," said Eric Schorn, VP marketing, Processor Division, ARM. "By leveraging the performance and power efficiency benefits of the Cortex family of processors along with their leading edge technologies, CSR can offer feature-rich, future proof solutions for every segment of the consumer electronics market."

The Cortex-A5 processor is fully application compatible with the Cortex-A9 processor, enabling joint access to an established developer and software ecosystem including Android, Adobe Flash, Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded, Symbian and Ubuntu, along with more than 700 ARM Connected Community members.

The ARM MPCore technology enables developers to exceed the performance of today's high-performance embedded devices while consuming significantly less power. In addition, the Cortex-A series processors feature power management features including adaptive gating, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling and the ability for each core to go independently into standby, dormant or power-off energy management states, providing control over the dynamic as well as the static energy consumed by both the processor and memories.

The Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A9 processors can contain up to four independently configured but fully coherent cores, carrying out multiple tasks on each one in parallel. However since any complexity is hidden in hardware, the processor can be programmed as easily as a single core processor by utilizing one of the many SMP-aware operating systems.