Arm Cortex-M

ARM has launched the first of a series of Cortex-M series microcontrollers based on the V8M architecture that incorporate the Trustzone security mechanism.

SoftBank cites IoT as its main reason for buying ARM, but could it change the relationship between customers and the processor designer?

ARM is bringing the Trustzone security architecture to future Cortex-M processor cores, combining that with a version of AHB that will recognise the difference between secure and non-secure transactions.

ARM CTO Mike Muller called for IP to be used throughout the IoT as part of a strategy for secure systems at a recent NMI seminar at Bletchley Park, England.

Texas Instruments has launched a family of ARM-based microcontrollers intended to act as a migration path from its low-energy 16bit MSP430 series, developing its own flash-capable 90nm process to implement them.

Research by the University of Michigan into subthreshold circuit design has led to spinoff company Ambiq Micro creating a family of microcontrollers that it claims provide an ARM Cortex-M4F with power consumption at levels normally associated with an M0+.

ARM's latest core, the dual-issue M7 borrows features from the Cortex-R family for safety-critical applications as well as adding the option of cache memory.

Manufacturing giant says we need a new category of WPUs - wearables processing units - to create a mass market and that ARM needs to go smaller than the MO.

Imagination Technologies has set up an open-source effort that mirrors ARM's Linaro group and cut a deal with Oracle for Java optimization.

Oracle aims to reduce the incompatibilities between the two main embeddable versions of Java as the company tries to make the language the natural choice for IoT.