Altera have announced a new integrated ARM Cortex-A9 multi-core CPU, with either a Cyclone V or Arria V FPGA. This combined package provides a range of peripherals attached to the Cortex-A9 CPU: 2 x Gbps Ethernet, DDR3 memory support, external memory controllers with DMA support (NAND, SPI, SDIO), along with a 128bit high speed interconnect to the FPGA core.

Volume pricing was targeted to start at $15, with the silicon available in the second half of 2012.

For further details, see here.

Laurence Bryan, Directory of 'Mobile Segment Marketing' at ARM has given an interview on how ARM is performing in the smart phone and mobile markets. It contains interesting details on their pricing model, and their future plans.

For further details, see .

Atmel have announced a new RF IDIC chip, the ATA5577M1. This 100-150kHZ RFID device is a tiny 2mm x 1.5mm x 0.37mm, using the XDFN package. As the package has an internal 330pF capacitor, it requirs only an external antenna coil to form a complete LF-RFID tag.

This device is available for sampling now, with pricing starting at $0.38USD for 20k quantities.

For further details, see here.

Samsung Semiconductor announce a new model in their Exynos Cortex-A9 CPU line. The new Exynos 4212 offers a dual core processor running at 1.5GHz,  video playback/recording of 1080p video, and a direct on-chip HDMI 1.4 interface. These features, combined with the 30% power efficiency from the 32nm process over the previous process, mean that this core is well placed for the tablet and high-end smart phone markets.

Sampling is expected to be available in Q4 2011.

For further details, see here.

Atmel and Redpine have announced a collaboration on low power 802.11n Wi-Fi. This allows easy connectivity to the Atmel AVR XMEGA, AVR UC3, SAM3 and SAM9 MCU families. Two options were presented, the Connect-io-n modules, with integrated TCP/IP stack, and the n-Link module, for high-performance with a host-managed stack. UART, SPI and SDIO interfacers, with up to 65Mbps of WiFi data throughput were presented.

For further details, see here.