Date: 13/03/2012

Processor interface bus bridge IP from Cortus

32 bit processor IP vendor Cortus which claims its processor IP is silicon efficient has released two bridges for their processor product range. The first bridge is between the Cortus APS bus and AHB-Lite while the second bridge is between the APS bus and APB.

"We recognise that many IC designers have already invested in peripherals using AHB-Lite and APB" said Michael Chapman, CEO and President of Cortus. He adds, "We are pleased to ensure that licensees of Cortus' low power, silicon efficient cores can protect their existing investment in peripherals". The new Cortus bridge products enable licensees of APS3 or FPS6 to cleanly interface to existing AHB & APB subsystems.

Then new bridges also said to enable a smooth migration of existing subsystems based on older microcontroller cores to Cortus microcontroller cores. Michael Chapman explains, "C and C++ rather than a particular instruction set are the industry standards for embedded systems". He adds, "All modern 32-bit cores support C and C++ and the main challenge to migrating designs lies in peripherals for which hardware-dependent software must be written". In modern system-on-chip applications there is virtually no processor-specific code. Michael Chapman adds, "The new bridges will enable drop-in replacement of older cores by efficient Cortus ones, the main issue for licensees will be writing the interrupt handler".

The Cortus microcontroller core APS3 from Cortus is said to offer the best performance in the industry in terms of DMIPS/mW and DMIPS/mm2 and has been licensed for low power applications such as Bluetooth LE, touchscreen controllers and SIM cards. The FPS6 provides high throughput floating point computation for applications such as motor control and floating point signal processing.

The ecosystem of a full development environment (for C and C++) is available from Cortus for its products.