Samsung Electronics announced the latest in its ARM11 series of application processors, the S5P6440. The device is dedicated to consumer electronic products such as personal navigation devices. S5P6440 is based on an ARM1176 CPU core which runs at either 533 MHz or 667MHz lock speed. The CPU core and all on-chip hardware accelerators and peripheral interfaces are connected through a 64-bit AXI bus running at 166MHz, allowing ample input/output bandwidth for handling the multiprocessing requirements in real-life applications.
The S5P6440 features 2D graphics acceleration hardware that is compliant with the OpenVG application programming interface (API) standard. The OpenVG API standard enables advanced graphics functions such as alpha blending for transparency effects, anti-aliasing for sharper graphics, and vector graphics support for scaling without loss of image quality. Utilizing this graphical capability, devices implemented with the S5P6440 can offer a vivid graphical user interface that greatly enhances the user experience. The S5P6440 incorporated various interface hardware IP. An advanced NAND error correction hardware is included to support current and next generation MLC NAND flash devices.
The device also integrated a DRAM memory controller that supports both mobile DDR (mDDR) as well as the lower cost DDR2 memory chips. In addition, the chip integrated a mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) display serial interface (DSI) for advanced graphics and display capabilities at low power. The MIPI DSI interface is valuable to customers wanting to reduce the complexity of the display interface by reducing the number of pins, which has benefits in terms of design simplicity and cost. MIPI DSI also uses a differential signal which substantially reduces EMI issues.
The application processor supports operation systems including WinCE and Linux. The chip is housed in a 13x13 FBGA package with a ball pitch of 0.65mm.