Zinitix BT541 Touch Screen Controller Uses Andes N968A

Fabless chip giant Zinitix, based in Yongin, South Korea, has licensed the AndesCore N968A-S CPU IP for its Progressive Capacitive(PCAP)Touch Screen Controller BT541.

Zinitix BT541 leverages the AndesCore N968A’s high performance and small gate count to provide the advanced PCAP functionality found in today’s smart phone touch panel controllers: multi-touch capability, gesture recognition, and touch accuracy. The Zinitix BT541 has been incorporated into the worldwide mobile phone industry supply chain.
According to HIS Inc., the capacitive touch controller IC market is forecast to double in size to $2.8 billion in 2017, from $1.4 billion in 2012, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 14.6 percent during the period.

The El Segundo, Calif. based market research firm declares capacitive touch technology is leading the growth.” In the past eight years, it has been steadily advancing in many areas including touch panel structure, its materials, and the manufacturing process. Along with this, the market for touch controller lCs, one of the key components that determine the touch screen panel’s performance, has also experienced growth.”

＂We are thrilled that Zinitix selected Andes from among our competitors for their BT541 fourth generation capacitive touch screen controller,＂ said Frankwell Lin, President of Andes. ” We look forward to continue enabling Zinitix to achieve their goal of becoming a global system IC leader. Korea is one of the most important markets for Andes.

In the future, Andes will aggressively promote its entire range of processors, the N7, N8, N9, N10, and N13, to provide SoC designers in Korea a wider selection of processor cores.＂

AndesCore N968A contributes to the cost/performance advantage of Zinitix’s BT541 to enable its success in the highly competitive PCAP touch screen market. Geoff Walker, Senior Touch Technologist, Intel Corp. places Zinitix in the top 15 PCAP controller suppliers worldwide.(＂Fundamentals of projected-Capacitive Touch Technoligy,＂ p.55)the N968A AndeStar™ V3 instruction set architecture adds 38 instructions to achieve superior system performance, minimum code size, and the lowest power consumption among competitive alternatives.

Zinitix Co., Ltd. Aims To Be the Global System IC Leader
Zinitix Co.is a fabless semiconductor enterprise specializing in developing world class system integrated circuits began in business nearly 20 years ago.

Since its founding, Zinitix has been invested heavily in innovative research and development. Today, Zinitix is high volume production of a wide variety of system ICs; touch controller ICs, auto focus driver ICs, haptic driver ICs, and motor driver ICs. Designed into smart phones, tablet PCs, laptop PCs, home appliances, and automotive applications, Zinitix products provide customers and markets epoch-making technology such as 1-layer touch and one chip auto-focus. Through creative R&D and leading technology, Zinitix’s Goal is become a global system IC leader providing the best products and services. For more information about Zinitix Co., Ltd, please visit http://www.Zinitix.com/eng/main/main.php

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Andes Technology Forms New Internet of Things Community Knect.me to Provide Open-Source and Commercial IoT Solutions based on AndesCore™ processors

Knect.me Partner Solutions Enable SoC Developers to Build Highly Competitive IoT Products to Meet Narrow, Fast-Moving Product Windows

【Taiwan Hsinchu】– Andes Technology Corporation, the leading Asia-based supplier of small, low-power, high performance 32-bit embedded CPU cores, today announced knect.me, the new Internet of Things community that provides open-source and commercial solutions for connected devices based on the highly performance-efficient AndesCore processors. Knect.me community partners provide the SoC development platforms, software stacks, application development platforms, and development tools SoC developers need to build highly competitive IoT products to meet narrow, fast moving product windows.

“IoT is a diversified market with great potential. In the past year, many partners have approached Andes seeking partnership,” said Charlie Hong-Men Su, Ph.D. Andes Technology CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D. “Because we know that it takes multiple companies cooperating to fully exploit a market potential. Andes would like to contribute to the expansion of the IoT market by providing enabling resources for developers. With this motivation in mind, we created a new website knect.me. The site will connect chip vendors, partners, applications developers, and system vendors related to IoT. Knect.me will also bring together solutions for silicon IP’s, software stacks, tools, applications, and systems to help develop products that will connect to the world.”

In addition to the knect.me community, Andes is also creating the “IoT League.”  The league will showcase successful products that have been developed through the knect.me community. “We’re inviting Andes’ customers to provide information on their products that contain AndesCore IP,” said Frankwell Jyh-Ming Lin, Andes Technology President. “In return, IoT League participants will receive greater exposure and enhanced reputation in the IoT market. By showcasing a broad expanding array of applications, new prospects will be attracted to adopt Andes customers’ products and solutions.”

About Knect.me solution
The Knect SoC Development Platform solution comprises the AndesCore™, Andes platform IP, and partners’ IPs. The Knect Software Stack provides choices of open source software, and production-proven, certified and optimized software by Andes partners to fulfill a wide range of smart products and emerging applications development requirements. The Knect Application Development Platforms include both FPGA based prototyping boards and ASIC based rapid development boards. The Knect Development Tools include the AndeSight IDE Lite and the open source GNU toolchain for AndesCores. AndeSight™ Lite is a compact version of the Eclipse-based AndeSight™ IDE for free download. It comes with all major functionality up to a code size limitation of 32KB.

Availability
The knect.me community website is available immediately at http://www.knect.me, or simply knect.me. For information about joining the knect.me community or to participate in the partnership program or IoT League, contact knectme@andestech.com

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Andes CPU Core Small Die Area and Low Power Consumption Wins New Socket in MediaTek SoCs

Andes Technology Corporation, the leader in developing easy to integrate, scalable, and configurable CPUs and platforms, announced this month that MediaTek Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company, has adopted the AndesCore™ N9 CPU IP in their SoCs. The AndesCore™ N9 is intended for deeply embedded applications that require optimal interrupt response time, efficient performance and compact code size, including wireless networking and sensors.

“We are thrilled that AndesCore N9 was selected for use in the MediaTek SoCs,” said Dr. Charlie Su, Chief Technical Officer and SVP of R&D at Andes. “The N9 dramatically reduces the instruction memory size and cost of the SoC through higher code density, when compared to legacy 8- or 16-bit MCUs. Despite the N9’s compact size, it still provides more than 40 percent better performance than competing 32-bit processor cores to enable functionality such as 802.11 drivers and TCP/IP protocol stack for network applications, GPIO and PWM for intelligent control, as well as UART and SPI interfaces for device communication.”

According to market analyst BI (Business Intelligence), smart home device shipments will grow faster than smart phones or other portable devices, at a compound annual rate of 67 percent for the next five years. The market research firm expects as many as 1.8 billion units to ship in 2019, including safety and security devices such as internet-connected sensors, monitors, cameras, and alarm systems and energy management components such as smart thermostats and lights. As Andes customers produce SoCs for this market opportunity, embedded processors such as the N9 will continue to see strong demand.

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Andes Unleashes AndeSight™ v2.1.0 IDEs, Offering Mature Development Suites to Satisfy Diversified Requirements


【Taiwan Hsinchu】Andes Technology Corporation, the leading vendor dedicated to 32-bit CPU IPs and associated SoC platforms in Asia, recently launched AndeSight™ v2.1.0 IDE in four different editions – STD (Standard), MCU, RDS (ReDiStribution), and Lite – to satisfy diversified market and customers. Prior to this release, the entry-level AndeSight v2.0.1 MCU/RDS IDE and the high-end AndeSight v2.0.1 STD IDE have already been widely adopted in the industry due to the user-friendly, powerful and fast-time-to-market characteristics. Inheriting advantages from these predecessors, the four AndeSight v2.1.0 editions are further enhanced to address specific needs of SoC developers. The STD edition is for Linux application development or development with virtual evaluation platforms while the MCU edition is designed to align with the development flow of MCU programs. Based on the MCU version, the RDS edition allows chip vendors to provide their customers an optimal development environment containing chip- or application-specific customized components, which include new graphical user interface (GUI), sample code, SoC settings and configurations, and an utility for flexible version control. Lastly, the Lite edition is a compact, evaluation AndeSight IDE targeting software developers of IoT or wearable devices. 

AndeSight v2.1.0 editions feature intuitive and refined GUI based on Eclipse CDT 8.0 platforms and enclose BSP v4.0.0 toolchains that boost code density and performance with better efficiency. They also provide complete support for AndesCore™ processor families (including N7, S8, N8, E8, N9, N10 and N13) and feature powerful functions like LdSaG editor, EVB profiling, code coverage analysis, function code size calculation, COPILOT (COProcessor Instruction DeveLOpment EnvironmenT) support, RTOS awareness debugging, flash ISP (in-system-programming), plug-in API, and internationalization support for three languages: English, Simplified-Chinese and Japanese. With outstanding debugging capabilities and significant code optimization, AndeSight facilitates program development on hardware platforms when working with Andes ICE solutions AICE-MCU or AICE-MINI. Designed to meet diversified requirements, the easy-to-use AndeSight v2.1.0 IDEs with high-performance toolchains enable Andes customers to gain competitive advantages and accelerate time-to-market.

AndeSight v2.1.0 MCU is the edition tailored for MCU programmers. Its toolchains support the extensible E8 core as well as standard Andes cores. Based on AndeStar™ V3/V3m ISA, these toolchains allow a development environment of All-C Embedded Programming and offer fine-tuned RTOS awareness support. To give users a jump start on using Andes cores and AndeSight, this MCU edition comes with startup demos in the package. Users may also utilize the simulator or target board profiling function to identify performance bottlenecks and tune application code accordingly. This IDE edition supports CPU cores with the ACE (Andes Custom Extension™) framework, such as E8. The ACE framework helps SoC developers simplify the instruction design process. Based on ACE descriptions, COPILOT generates the corresponding extension modules to be used with Andes standard development tools, debugging tools, simulator and AndesCore RTL, rendering an exclusive development environment for the CPUs newly created by SoC developers.

Regarding to debugging tools, AndeSight v2.1.0 MCU can work with Andes low-cost, high-efficiency ICE solutions AndeShape™ AICE-MCU and AICE-MINI through two-wire Serial Debug Port interface, benefiting developers from reduced pin counts and SoC costs. The AICEs support the advanced Debug-on-Reset and Secure Access features in addition to AndesCore’s standard debugging mechanisms such as hardware breakpoint and single step execution. They provide auto frequency calibration and use OpenOCD as its management software to achieve an even faster download speed compared to the last version. They also support new AndeSight features such as EVB profiling function, exception handling and problem diagnosis.

In terms of building custom development environment, AndeSight v2.1.0 MCU provides extensive supports including chip profile editor, plug-in API, and LdSaG editor. Based on the characteristics of individual SoC, the GUI chip profile editor facilitates developers to quickly specify parameters for relevant components like project template, toolchain, memory map, flash driver and SoC registers before generating chip profiles accordingly. The flexible plug-in API allows users to develop additional but fully-integrated GUI by directly accessing AndeSight resources. The LdSaG editor is newly introduced to AndeSight. It enables users to create the much simplified linking description SaG (Scattering-and-Gathering) files with ease through a drag-and-drop interface. A SaG file is automatically converted to a GNU linker script file for use in linking by Andes linker script generator utility.

AndeSight v2.1.0 Lite is a compact version derived from AndeSight v2.1.0 MCU and can be downloaded free of charge. It includes a V3m toolchain and has a code size limitation of 32KB. Poised for evaluation or prototyping development with virtual or physical platforms of Andes low-power processors, AndeSight v2.1.0 Lite is best-suited to develop a wide range of innovative IoT and wearable devices.

AndeSight v2.1.0 RDS is the redistribution edition descended from AndeSight v2.1.0 MCU too. It is for SoC vendors to provide their customers a tailor-made environment based on their SoCs for the best development efficiency. Examples of customizable items include new GUI designed through plug-in API, flash burner, SoC register definitions, memory maps, compiler/debugger options, sample code, and documentation.

Last but not least, AndeSight v2.1.0 STD is the version offering the most comprehensive features. In addition to functions in the MCU counterpart, the STD edition includes enhanced functionalities for development environment setup, debugging and verification. With regard to program debugging, this edition extends its support to Linux application development by providing in-time debugging and attach-to-process debugging through Process View. In addition, its performance profiling covers all activities in the system and allows users to analyze the time spent on user processes, system libraries and kernel. Supporting both Windows and Linux platforms, it enables a fully integrated GUI development environment, containing software management, compiling, flash programming, debugging, and profiling, for all Andes processors.

Dr. Charlie Su, Chief Technical Officer and VP of R&D at Andes, stated, “In Andes, the launch of quality and efficient development tools is deemed just as importantly as the release of leading AndesCore embedded processor IPs. That is why we set a continuous goal to deliver easy-to-use AndeSight IDE with higher efficiency, optimized code and all-around supports for hardware, software and system. The AndeSight v2.1.0 IDEs are the outcome of numerous internal discussions and revisions incorporating customer feedbacks. Its performance boost and compelling new features like hardware profiling, code coverage and LdSaG editor not only manifest Andes’ achievements on advancing development tools but also demonstrate our continuing commitments to customers.”

For more information about AndeSight v2.1.0 IDEs, AndeShape AICE-MCU or AICE-MINI, please refer to www.andestech.com or contact sales@andestech.com

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