Samsung Electronics Introduces World’s Fastest ARM9-based Application Processor for Personal Navigation and Mobile Devices

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Barcelona, Spain – February 12, 2007 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced the successful development of a new application processor (AP) for mobile and embedded solutions – the S3C2443. The S3C2443 is a cost efficient solution that provides support for a broad variety of interface options that include GPS, Mobile TV, WiFi, and Bluetooth. It is equipped to meet the requirements of next generation mobile and embedded solutions, especially personal navigation devices (PND), personal digital assistants (PDA) and wireless handhelds.

A reference platform based on Samsung’s new S3C2443 for navigation and mobile TV applications is being demonstrated at Hall 1, booth D33 at the 3GSM World Congress 2007.

At 533MHz, Samsung’s S3C2443 provides the highest speed using the ARM920T processor core. In addition to high speed performance, Samsung has improved key architectural elements to resolve the bottlenecks that many embedded systems presently experience. The bus controller of the S3C2443 is built around a dual bus architecture (dual AHB bus), with one bus for DRAM and the other for ROM/Flash memory. As a result, its CPU can simultaneously access both buses, giving an impressive boost to overall performance and resolving usual bottleneck problems in memory bandwidth/CPU speed.

Furthermore, S3C2443 includes a colour space conversion hardware accelerator which converts YCbCr data from external memory into RGB data on the display. This allows for better performance in multimedia applications that require intensive memory operations. As a result, using a software codec, S3C2443 has support capability for H.264 decoding at 30-frames per second for common intermediate format contents with audio, enabling use of such mobile TV solutions as T-DMB and DVB-H without any external multimedia hardware chip.

S3C2443 supports MLC NAND Flash for added cost efficiency in applications which have large data storage requirements such as PNDs. The DRAM memory controller in S3C2443 supports mobile DDR SDRAM with 16bit configuration in addition to SDRAM with 16/32bit configuration, offering the flexibility to choose either memory type for the utmost in cost efficiency and performance.

„The bigger the personal navigator market becomes, the more important PND BOM cost reduction is. Samsung’s S3C2443 is a very cost effective solution to meet this requirement through its flexible support of various NAND Flash and DRAM memory products.“ said Samuel Wang, General Manager of Mobile Business Unit, MiTAC International Corp, Taiwan.

S3C2443 offers many connectivity options such as USB2.0 device, compact flash interface, high speed MMC interface, and CE-ATA interface. In addition, S3C2443 is the first processor to utilize an innovative high speed MMC interface, drastically increasing the speed of conventional MMC read-and-write operations by up to twenty times. Non-MMC based storage solutions are also feasible; these include Samsung’s moviNAND(TM) and S-SIM, as well as ATAonMMC, which enables the use of hard disk drives.

„Because the processor is the core component in a system, it has to provide scalability and flexibility to meet current and future system demands. Samsung S3C2443 meets these requirements very well by providing an extensive set of peripherals and system interface options.“ said Yiwan Wong, Vice President of Marketing at Samsung Electronics‘ System LSI Division.

The S3C2443 is now in mass production and market available. Samsung continues to expand its AP line up with this new introduction, further reinforcing its position as a leading company in the AP industry. For more product information, please visit our website.