LONDON — European companies are set to dominate the embedded processors session of the upcoming HotChips conference scheduled to take place at Stanford University (Palo Alto, Calif.), Aug. 20 to 22.

The session, which starts proceedings on Aug. 22, kicks off with a presentation by Arjan Bink of Handshake Solutions NV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), a subsidiary of Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), who is expected to discuss the clockless ARM996HS processor core.

The ARM996HS core was introduced to the market in February 2006 with simulations that showed the core, touted as the electronics industry's first commercially available clockless processor core, could cut power consumption to about one third of that of a similar clocked processor core from ARM Holdings plc.

Even though such extreme power saving could have a dramatic effect across the industry, partners ARM (Cambridge, England) and Handshake are promoting the core for its low electromagnetic signature as much as for its power efficiency.

However, there is still much to learn about the ARM996HS, such as how to organize an interrupt scheme for a clockless processor?

In the same session Stephen Hill of ARM is due to present a paper on the "Design of a reusable 1-GHz, superscalar ARM processor." This is expected to be the licensable processor previously codenamed Tiger and now introduced to the market as the Cortex A8. The Cortex-A8 processor is the first applications processor based on the ARMv7 instruction set architecture and is the highest performance processor ever developed by ARM.