Luminary declines to license ARM's tiny core

Luminary was founded in 2004 and emerged in 2006 as the lead partner for ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) on its Cortex-M3 processor core for 32-bit microcontrollers. Luminary has gone on to produce a broad range of microncontrollers under the Stellaris brand and might have been expected to take an interest in the development of a more power-efficient MCU processor core by ARM.

ARM announced the follow-on Cortex-M0, previously codenamed Swift, after an 18-month development cycle (see ARM preps tiny core for low-power microcontrollers).

"We do not have a Cortex-M0 license, and we won’t be taking one — it’s just not right for our business model and market footprint," said Jean Anne Booth, chief marketing officer at Luminary. "We think Cortex-M3 has the perfect blend of functionality and price/performance, and since we already reach deep into 8-bit space with our lower-end Cortex-M3’s, we are happy with the solutions we have today and the ones we have in development."

Booth continued: "As you know, the Cortex-M0 is a subset of Cortex-M3, and my view is that it is really aimed more at semiconductor companies with their own fabs who have the cost structure to drive even more deeply into 8-bit space than we can get with our fabless cost structure. At the small end of things, the overall cost structure can easily override small die-size differences like Cortex-M0 versus Cortex-M3."

Luminary plans to launch a fourth generation of Stellaris microcontrollers based on the Cortex-M3 core at the Embedded World 2009 exhibition in Nuremberg. The latest Stellaris will offer 80-MHz performance,integrated Ethernet, USB, and CAN. The devices are said to be suitable for advanced motion control, energy conversion, security access and controls, industrial control, and connectivity applications.

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