December 1, 2006 -- The ARM architecture is enjoying increasing acceptance within the automotive and industrial markets that are traditionally the domain of proprietary designs. The recent announcement of ARM's Cortex-M—available for the first time in Luminary Micro's Stellaris family—strengthens this architecture's challenge by implementing a redesign that addresses comparative weaknesses in the original ARM7TDMI and its upwardly compatible successors, notably within real-time-response performance.

Unsurprisingly, vendors with long histories in the automotive sector are reluctant to cede market share and continue to introduce new silicon that raises the price and performance bar for application-specific devices. Several recent 32-bit proprietary products suit applications from general-purpose embedded control to infotainment, hard real time, and DSP, from the perspective of the low-cost-development environments that their makers believe will highlight each chip's capabilities.

By David Marsh, EDN Contributing Technical Editor