Samsung, Intrinsity Develop 'Fastest' Cortex-A8 Mobile Processor Core in 45nm LP Process

Jul 28, 2009 15:37 Nikkei Electronics Asia

Samsung and Intrinsity have jointly announced what they claim is the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM Cortex-A8 processor architecture in 45nm low power (LP), low leakage process technology.

This Cortex-A8 implementation, codenamed Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM NEON multimedia extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung said it is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core.

To achieve a 1GHz operating clock speed in 45nm LP process, the Hummingbird utilizes a semi-custom design flow which involves custom designed circuit/memory structures, a set of customized primitive cells, and the enhanced RTL FastCore and Fast14 high-speed domino logic from Intrinsity in its implementation. A multi-Vdd / multi-frequency design methodology was also used to ensure the Hummingbird can run at high speed even at the minimum supply voltage of 1V. The low power consumption and the high operating clock performance make the Hummingbird a suitable processor core for use in advanced mobile devices.

A highly effective synthesis flow which creates static logic with optimal timing and power was employed to generate the gate-level view of the Hummingbird. With this flow, standard cell gates are placed to minimize wire delay and maximize speed. Highly automated Vt and cell selection flows choose the best gates for speed while balancing power. Finally, a high performance physical design integration flow which includes automated and optimized bus routing, driving, and re-buffering is used to generate the final design.

Intrinsity's Coretex-A8 processor-based FastCore embedded core is cycle-accurate and Boolean equivalent to the original Cortex-A8 RTL specification. While most ARM processor cores are implemented with synthesized static logic and compiled SRAMs, the Hummingbird is claimed to achieve an exceptional 1GHz clock rate in Samsung's 45nm LP process technology through the use of a semi-custom design flow which applies Intrinsity's proprietary Fast14 1-of-n domino logic (NDL) technology as macros in the timing-critical paths of the Cortex-A8 RTL core.

According to Intrinsity, NDL is claimed to provide low latency conversion between domino logic and static logic which allows NDL to be seamlessly applied to a standard cell synthesized design. NDL provides gates which are 25% to 50% faster than static logic gates.

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