Arm Brings SoC ASIC Design to Embedded IoT Mainstream

The free SoC tools on Arm's DesignStart portal have been retargeted from a purely academic and educational focus to offering embedded IoT developers low-cost ASIC design services.

by Bernard Cole, Contributing Editor - EETimes, Oct. 13, 2015 – 

Arm Ltd. this week introduced an Arm Cortex-M0-based system-on-chip design capability that the company expects to change the economics of embedded and IoT application specific IC development. The new tool suite is now available on Arm's existing DesignStart portal, a free SoC design resource introduced several years ago by Arm for use by academic institutions for educational purposes.

In an interview with EE Times, Richard York, embedded segment vice president at Arm Ltd., said that the revised version of DesignStart means that the advantages of ASIC design previously only available to large companies with markets in the million units per year will now be accessible to small to medium-sized companies with designs numbering 10,000 to 100,000 unit applications.

The portal has been upgraded and retargeted to offer a similar set of free but considerably enhanced SoC capabilities that York believes will be useful to companies developing commercial applications. To make the package even more attractive to smaller companies, the company has added a set of low-cost prototyping and development aids for accelerating development of ASIC designs.

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