A low-cost, 300-MHz, RISC CPU with attached media processor

This paper describes the 300-MHz StrongARM 1500 microprocessor, which is capable of more than two billion 16-b operations per second. Starting with the original StrongARM 110 design, an attached media processor (AMP) has been integrated along with a synchronous DRAM memory controller and separate I/O bus. In addition, several enhancements have been made to the CPU and cache subsystem, and the chip has been shrunk from a 0.35-to a 0.28-μm technology. The chip includes 3.3 million transistors and measures 60 mm². It dissipates less than 3 W at 300 MHz at 2.0-V internal, 3.3-V I/O. The chip supports dynamic clock frequency switching for reduced operating power during low performance demands. There are 333 separately conditioned clocks on the chip, For battery-powered applications, V_dd can be reduced to achieve <0.5 W operation at 150 MHz. The chip is pseudostatic and can support clock stop and quiescent supply current testing. It implements the ARM V4 instruction set [1]