µP Cores Can Lower Costs For Portable Designs

These three additions to the ARM7 32-bit microprocessor core family are intended to provide designers with a reduced cost, low-power solution for portable, multimedia and embedded applications, such as PDAs, smart telephones, digital set-top boxes and Internet appliances. The ARM740T, ARM720T and ARM710T have an added 8-KB cache, along with write buffer and memory management functions. Designers can implement complex systems that require use of real-time or virtual memory operating systems, such as Windows CE, pSOS and EPOC32. The 8-KB cache minimizes a system's need for external memory access and allows the use of low-cost commodity RAM without loss of performance to let the system bus and external memory operate at lower speeds than the processor to reduce power consumption.