ARM today announced a new member of the Cortex-M processor core family, the Cortex-M4. It is advertised as a “DSC (digital signal controller)”, a hybrid between microcontroller and DSP (digital signal processor). In features the M-series’ Thumb-2 instruction set, and DSP extensions like single-cycle MAC (multiply-accumulate), a hardware divider, and an optional single precision FPU (floating point unit). The target clock speed is 150 MHz.

From the available information it seems that the Cortex-M4 will be competing with TI’s C2000 family, which includes devices at similar clock speeds and optional FPUs, and Microchip’s slightly lower-end dsPIC. Applications cited by ARM range from motor control to audio processing.

According to the press release, five semiconductor companies, including NXP, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments have already licensed the Cortex-M4.

More information:

• Press release
• Cortex-M4 product page

Atmel has announced a new controller family called AT91SAM3U based on the ARM Cortex-M3. If you have been following the development of the ARM market this was only a matter of time, since the big competitors NXP and TI (with its recent aquisition of Luminary) are already shipping Cortex-M3 based controllers. Unlike them however, Atmel seems to be targeting only the higher end of Cortex-M3 applications, which is also not too surprising considering their strong position in the 8 bit market with the AVR (and AVR XMEGA) family.

Texas Instruments just announced that they acquired Luminary Micro, vendor of the popular ARM Cortex M3-based Stellaris microcontroller series. A step that seems to make sense, since TI had fallen a bit behind in the general purpose, low end ARM controller market.

An article section has been added on EmbDev.net. The first articles are a general overview of ARM-based microcontrollers (cores, development tools) and my ARM MP3/AAC Player project (previously published on Mikrocontroller.net).

The articles are organized as a Wiki, that means anyone can edit and create articles. If you want to write an article about a project you would like to present or a topic that interests you, see How to create a new article.

All articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The new Stellaris 9000 series by Luminary is based on the ARM Cortex-M3 and offers up to 96 kB RAM and 100 MHz clock speed. New features include I2S (for audio CODECs) and an external peripheral interface that supports SDRAM and a host mode.