ARM Introduces New License Model For Big.Little Technology to Enable Wider Adoption

Under the terms of a single use design license, ARM partners can license the individual components required to enable the development of a big.LITTLE system, including the ARM Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 processors; the CoreLink Cache Coherent Interconnect (CCI-400); the Generic Interrupt Controller (GIC-400) and the AMBA Domain Bridge (ADB-400), all as a single package.

ARM partners licensing the package can also license the Mali-T600 GPU to provide industry-leading graphics performance to the platform, or ARM POP Technology for core-hardening acceleration to aid efficient implementation of their design.

The Cortex-A15 processor is the highest performance processor available from ARM. The Cortex-A7 processor is ARM’s most energy-efficient applications processor. These two processors are combined together in the big.LITTLE technology to give users optimal performance for all kinds of simultaneous applications and tasks. The CCI-400 is the industry-leading, silicon-proven, cache-coherent interconnect for big.LITTLE systems. It has been designed and tested with other CoreLink components, such as the Network Interrupt Controller (NIC-400) and the Dynamic Memory Controller (DMC-400), which share the same end-to-end Quality of Service protocol.

Due to the successful adoption of big.LITTLE processing by 17 partners to date, including Samsung, Renesas, CSR, Fujitsu and MediaTek, ARM has now created this new license model to enable enhanced access to the key big.LITTLE components from one package. This single-use design license will help ARM partners to develop a single big.LITTLE system, with the option to take a perpetual implementation license in the future.

The big.LITTLE components are available under this new licensing model from today.