Samsung announced today the latest in its ARM11 series of application processors, the S5P6440. Designed using Samsung?s 45nm low power CMOS process technology, the S5P6440 is a cost effective solution for consumer electronic (CE) products such as personal navigation devices (PND).

Samsung?s S5P6440 is based on an ARM1176 CPU core which runs at either 533 MHz or 667MHz clock speed. The CPU core and all on-chip hardware accelerators and peripheral interfaces are connected through a 64-bit AXI bus running at 166MHz, allowing ample input/output bandwidth for handling the multiprocessing requirements in real-life applications.

The S5P6440 features 2D graphics acceleration hardware that is compliant with the OpenVG application programming interface (API) standard. The OpenVG API standard enables advanced graphics functions such as alpha blending for transparency effects, anti-aliasing for sharper graphics, and vector graphics support for scaling without loss of image quality.



To lower the system BOM cost and ease the design complexity, the S5P6440 incorporated various interface hardware IP. An NAND error correction hardware is included to support current and next generation MLC NAND flash devices which offer higher storage density at a lower cost. The S5P6440 also integrated a DRAM memory controller that supports both mobile DDR (mDDR) as well as the lower cost DDR2 memory chips, allowing device manufacturer?s different choices of storage device types to meet different market segments? requirements.

In addition, the S5P6440 integrated a mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) display serial interface (DSI) for advanced graphics and display capabilities at low power. The MIPI DSI interface reduces the complexity of the display interface by reducing the number of pins, which has benefits in terms of design simplicity and cost. MIPI DSI also uses a differential signal which reduces EMI issues.

Samsung?s new S5P6440 application processor supports all major high-level operation systems including WinCE and Linux.

The S5P6440 application processor is sampling now and is scheduled for volume shipment in the third quarter of this year. The chip is housed in a 13x13 FBGA package with a ball pitch of 0.65mm.