Embedded Press

Tuesday, April 4, 2017 Every day, new heterogeneous multicore processors/System on Chips (SoCs) are launched in the market. The incorporation of microcontrollers and peripheral cores on SoCs is becoming a very common practice, look at the latest releases of NXP ® :  i.MX 6SoloX ,  i.MX 7  and the upcoming  i.MX 8  ( recently announced to be in the Toradex Apalis family ). Looks to me like something that happened in the past when the ADC (Analog Digital Converter) started to be integrated as peripheral functions on the microcontrollers, having the microcontroller core in an application processor, is solving several issues related to real-time control on Linux-based solutions.

Monday, February 13, 2017 Application processor usage continues to broaden. System-on-Chips, often powered by ARM ®  Cortex-A cores, are overtaking several spaces where small ARM ®  Cortex-M, and other microcontroller devices, have traditionally dominated. This trend is driven by several facts, such as: The strong requirements for connectivity, often related to IoT and not only from a hardware point of view, but also related to software, protocols and security The need for highly interactive interfaces such as multi-touch, high resolution screens and elaborate graphical user interfaces The decreasing price of SoCs, as consequence of its volume gain and new production capabilities