Mobile World Congress 2010
15 Feb - 18 Feb 2010
Barcelona, Spain, Fira Barcelona

Embedded World 2010
02 Mar - 04 Mar 201
Nuremberg, Germany, Exhibition Centre Nuremberg

ESC Silicon Valley 2010
27 Apr - 29 Apr 2010
San Jose, CA McEnery Convention Center

IQ Magazine Interview with NXP’s Geoff Lees:
NXP Launches the LPC1100

NXP announced the release of the LPC1100 on November 16. The LPC1100, based on the ARM Cortex-M0 processor core, will be available from distributors in mid-December. Billed as the “lowest priced 32-bit mcu solution in the market”, the LPC1100 offers higher value and ease-of-use than existing 8/16-bit microcontrollers.

The following interview is between Geoff Lees, the Vice President and General Manager, Microcontroller Product Line, NXP Semiconductors, and Glenn ImObersteg, the publisher and editor of IQ.

IQ: I've heard that you worked closely with ARM in the creation of this new Cortex. How were you involved?

Geoff: Yes, we were involved closely. The first requirements were that we were looking for a Cortex-based core with a smaller dynamic power and static power profile than the current M3 or the existing ARM7, and we talked with ARM for a while about a number of ways to implement that idea. The end result was the proposal to go ahead with the project code-named "Swift", which later became the Cortex-M0 processor core.

IQ: When was the project initiated?

Geoff: It started a couple of years back, and really reached fruition with the announcement of the Cortex-M0 processor by ARM at the 2009 Embedded World in Nuremberg, last February. At that show we were introduced as a lead partner in the development of a series of microcontrollers based on Cortex-M0.

IQ: Why the M0? What was the rationale behind having one more Cortex core?

Geoff: For the launch of our new LPC1100 Cortex-M0 family, we've utilized the Core-mark benchmark, which is an open source benchmark suite available from EEMBC, to demonstrate that code size from the LPC1100 can be typically half the code size of an existing 8-bit solution.

Even peripheral code and small software drivers won't be any larger in Cortex-M0 than in a typical 8-bit architecture. There's even likelihood that it will be reduced in size.

However, any significant application code is going to be smaller by as much as 30-50 percent. We believe that it's a true value proposition for current 8-bit users, who pretty much never saw any benchmarks in the past between Thumb and 8-bit. More

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