NEC SoCLite Embedded ARM + CE Support for 64-Bit Microprocessors

Standard-cell application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are targeted at very high volume customers and are, well, "application-specific," designed to do one thing for one application. NEC is attempting to give designers a little flexibility to design ASICs specific to their own applications. The company is now shipping its new System-on-a-Chip Lite (SoCLite) gate array family and development boards, comprising an embedded ARM7 microcontroller core, 190,000 usable logic gates, peripherals and memory that have all been tested and verified. SoCLite is targeted at customers using 30,000 to 200,000 units per year in a wide variety of applications. NEC says that SoCLite gives microcontroller designers an easier means to develop their own ASICs by letting them use the 32-bit ARM7 microcontroller as part of a gate array. SoCLite consists of two building blocks. One block contains the ARM7TDMI microcontroller, peripherals and memory. The other block contains 190,000 raw logic gates that interface to the microcontroller AMBA Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB).

NEC is now offering a development board that contains the SoCLite ASIC with an ARM7 microcontroller and a direct interface to a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which will let designers use readily available tools to prototype in silicon rather than via simulation. The FPGA can be reprogrammed until the system is fully debugged and connectors enable all SoCLite signals to be attached to other hardware to prototype the application. After board-level verification, SoCLite designs can be implemented in a single gate-array device with NEC's 0.35-micron drawn ASIC technology. NEC Electronics' SoCLite custom controller device is currently available in production volumes in a 256-pin plastic ball grid array (PBGA). OEM pricing is U.S. $17.50 per device in 30K units. The SoCLite development board is available for U.S. $5,050.00.

In other NEC news, the company just announced, along with MIPS Technologies, that the new Microsoft Windows CE ``Talisker'' Beta 2 operating system includes 64-bit support. The nextgen mini-OS will support both NEC's line of 64-bit MIPS processors and MIPS's licensable 64-bit processor architecture and cores. Embedded processors based on the MIPS architecture offer a hardware floating-point unit, 64-bit data, graphics extensions, SIMD (single-instruction, multiple data) support for streaming video and audio, and multi-issue pipelines.