2GHz Dual Core Cortex-A9 Targets Tablets

Oct. 31, 2010

NuFront's 40nm dual core Cortex-A9 chip runs at 2GHz. It targets tablets and mobile devices using less than 2W at 1.6 GHz.

William G. Wong

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NuSmart 2816

Nufront's 40nm NuSmart 2816 (Fig. 1) is based on Arm's latest Cortex-A9 MPCore The dual core NuSmart 2816 runs at 2GHz and targets thin laptops and netbooks as well as tablets. The designers utilized multi-layer hybrid interconnect technology along with fine grain clock gating to reduce power requirements. The chip uses less than 2W when running at 1.6 GHz.

The chip also incorporates multicore 2D/3D graphics processors with a 1080p multi-format video engine. The engine handles a range of formats include H.264, H.263, MPEG-2/4, and RMVB. It supports Arm's NEON architecture and it can deliver 800M pixel/s and 45M triangles/s. The 64-bit memory controller can handle DDR2 and DDR3-10666 memory. The NuSmart 2816 has a range of peripherals including 1 Gbit Ethernet, SATA 2, SPI, I²C, and four USB 2.0 ports. The I²S supports SPDIF. The /SD/MMC/SDIO port handles SD 2.0, SDIO 1.1 and MMC 4.2 devices. The NuSmart comes in a 23mm by 23mm, flip-chip BGA package.

Arm
NuFront

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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