STMicroelectronics announced a new member of its SPEAr family of configurable System on-Chip ICs.
Manufactured in state-of-the-art low-power 65nm process technology, the new SPEAr Basic device addresses a wide variety of embedded applications, including entry-level printers, fax machines, digital photo frames, Voice-over-IP and other equipment.
ST’s SPEAr (Structured Processor Enhanced Architecture) concept uniquely combines cost savings and shorter time-to-market of open-market standard products with the flexibility of application-specific ICs in optimizing system performance. Transfer of the SPEAr family to 65nm process technology yields increased density, performance and power-reduction features in new SPEAr devices.
ST’s newest configurable SoC integrates an advanced ARM926EJ-S processor core with two 16k memory caches, running at 333MHz, for data and instructions and up to 300,000 gates (ASIC-equivalent) of embedded configurable logic.
The new SPEAr Basic provides memory interfaces supporting LP-DDR and DDR2 memories and a large connectivity-IP (intellectual property) portfolio, including Fast-IrDA interface, Ethernet MAC, three USB 2.0 ports with embedded PHYs, UART, SPI, I2C, up to 102 fully programmable GPIOs and a total of 72 Kbytes of SRAM and 32 Kbytes of Boot ROM.
Best-in-class printing performance is enabled through a full set of image-pipeline accelerators, from color-space conversion to raster-file generation, a rotation engine, a hardware JPEG codec, an LCD controller (up to 1024×768, 24-bits per pixel) and a SDIO/MM card interface.
Additional features include a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter, a crypto accelerator based on ST’s proprietary C3 IP, a Flexible Static Memory controller (NOR/NAND Flash and SRAM), TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing) and SLIC (Serial Link and Interrupt) controllers and a camera interface, providing unprecedented scale of integration and flexibility.
SPEAr Basic’s software-configurable power-saving modes address most recent ecological and power-sensitive specifications. The device supports most popular embedded operating systems including Linux, VxWorks, ThreadX and Windows CE.