San Jose, CA; Wireless/Portable Symposium — (press release excerpt) — Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas (SMA) and Parthus Technologies announced today that SMA has licensed Parthus' InfoStream mobile computing platform. Future SMA system-on-chip (SOC) products incorporating InfoStream will target mobile computing devices with the equivalent processing capability of a desktop PC, but with the… exceptionally low power consumption required for mobile devices. Typical applications are expected to include handheld and mobile Internet-enabled computing devices, such as 3G smartphones, PDAs, automotive, Internet appliances, and wireless tablets. The new InfoStream-based SOCs will be supported with several embedded operating systems including Symbian, Linux, and Windows CE.

About InfoStream

The Parthus InfoStream platform features an ARM920 core, a memory management unit, and is one of the most highly integrated system-on-chip platforms available today. Extensive power management features such as highly sophisticated clock gating techniques deliver ultra low power consumption. The platform, which is targeted at both 0.25 and 0.18 micron CMOS processes, includes the following on-chip functions . . .

• ARM9TDMI CPU with 16KB I/D cache
  
• PLL-controlled processor speed, up to 200MHz
  
• Sophisticated memory control for SRAM, ROM, PCMCIA, CompactFlash, and Synchronous Flash
  
• Interrupt controller with up to 28 sources
  
• MMU, supporting 32 and 16 bit instruction sets
  
• 10 channel DMA for streaming data modes
  
• Selectable boot sources
  
• 40KB on-chip embedded SRAM for video frame buffer
  
• Color LCD controller for quarter-VGA to VGA
  
• 3 UARTS, including IrDA; up to 115Kbps
  
• USB controller
  
• Advanced Codec Interface
  
• Smartcard and Multi-Media Card interfaces
  
• 60 bits of general purpose I/O
  
• 3 16-bit counter-timers
  
• Real time clock

Additional technologies available from Parthus as SOC IP include Bluetooth, GPS, and MP3 audio. According to Jerry O'Brien, Product Marketing Manager, the InfoStream platform supports Embedded Linux and the Bluetooth IP was developed using Embedded Linux. “Parthus has lots of experience getting embedded applications up and running on Linux based devices,” said O'Brien.

 
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