Toshiba licences ARM Cortex-A53 processor for ASSP development

The Company expects to bring products based on the most power-efficient ARMv8-A processor, capable of seamlessly supporting 32-bit and 64-bit code, to market at an early date.

The industrial market is seeing strong demand for 64-bit capabilities and high reliability. The network market requires high-speed, low-power-consumption operation, real time processing and multi-clustered storage systems for huge data handling and data encryption. IoT products require power-efficient MPUs, and applications relying on enormous storage capacity need an expanded memory address space. Toshiba will develop products to meet these various demands.

The processor will allow Toshiba to hasten the development of highly featured, high performance systems that meet the functional safety requirements of ISO26262 for the automotive market and to provide customers with solutions for next generation automotive applications.

The Cortex-A53 processor features an 8-stage in-order pipeline, and strengthened data access / instruction fetch techniques. It also features ARM NEON technology with enhanced multimedia handling capabilities in addition to 128-bit SIMD ordering capabilities, as well as a cryptographic engine that accelerates encryption handling such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) by extending architectures.

“Toshiba’s commitment to build SoCs based on Cortex-A53 further highlights the diverse range of use cases for the industry’s leading low-power 64-bit processor,” said Nandan Nayampally, Vice President, Marketing, CPU group, ARM.  “The Cortex-A53 will deliver new levels of compute performance into power and space constrained environments in automotive, IoT and networking infrastructure applications and the processor safety package enables Toshiba to create products compliant with the latest functional safety standards.”

Adding the Cortex-A53 processor to its ARM portfolio will allow Toshiba to strengthen its wide product line-up and improve product competitiveness. Toshiba will continue enhance its semiconductor business by constantly introducing optimized ARM processor cores to meet a wide range of customer needs.