Furthering its partnership with Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, Hyundai Electronics America’s Symbios Logic Inc is to integrate the ARM7TDMI 32-bit microprocessor core it licensed from the Cambridge, UK company (CI No 2,785) into its SYMCore Application Specific Integrated Circuit libraries. Symbios says its Symcore design program enables its ASIC designer customers to build flexible, high-powered embedded applications. The ARM relationship will provide ASIC designers with the building blocks needed to put increasingly more functionality on a single chip, Symbios said. The first product of the ARM agreement is Symbios’s SYM7TDMI, a 32-bit ARM RISC microprocessor with advanced debug capabilities, and an ARM Thumb extension that enables instructions to be compressed to 16-bit and decompressed on the fly to 32-bit when needed, thus saving memory. The SYM7TDMI is supported by a complete tool kit for Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co Unix hosts. The product offers designers higher throughput and lower power operation. Symbios plans to create a range of application-specific chips and controllers for applications such as set-top boxes, cable modems and cellular phones.
