Meeting System-Level Design Challenges with Highly Integrated SoCs

摘要

New generation PDAs are gain-ing popularity in many differ-ent commercial and consumer markets. Whether the application is a simple consumer Personal Information Manager (PIM) or a commercial wireless Point of Sale (POS) terminal, design engineers face several common challenges in these complex designs. Minimizing time-to market, cost, power consumption and in some cases, size are key design criteria for these types of products. Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas (SMA) has developed the BlueStreak line of ARM-based System-on-Chips (SoC) that take aim at solving these design issues by providing a high-level of peripheral integration and functionality. When designing PDAs running on open-source operating systems such as Linux, engineers face even greater challenges in identifying a SoC that can balance the need for a high-level of functionality with that of acceptable performance and low-power consumption.