GOWIN Semiconductor today announced that its GW1NS product family was named a 2018 Arm TechCon Innovation Award finalist for design innovation of the year.

GOWIN’s GW1NS-2C is the first of its microprocessor-based SoC family.  The architecture of the product is unique in that it uses a shared resource technology.  Typically, a microprocessor is designed with the core of the processor connected to peripherals via a bus architecture.  The peripherals could include JTAG, SRAM memory, I/O interfaces, PLL’s, oscillators, etc.  The GW1NS-2C shares its peripheral resources with a barebone Arm Cortex M3 to leverage the complete system for size and power.  In addition, because the peripheral functionality is located inside the FPGA portion of the SoC, it is possible to change the peripheral functionality by reprogramming the FPGA fabric.  This allows for complete flexibility in a SoC environment that no other microprocessor product can offer today.

The Arm TechCon Innovation Awards program celebrates leading-edge Arm-based technologies that have spawned new applications and sparked innovation in systems design. Arm TechCon, the world’s leading conference and exhibition showcasing Arm-based technologies, will be held Oct. 16-18 at the San Jose Convention Center.

A tour of finalists’ booths and their technologies will be conducted at Arm TechCon Wednesday Oct. 17 at 3:30 p.m. Winners will then be announced at 5 p.m. in the expo theater. For more information and to register for the event, please visit armtechcon.com.

“We are honored to receive this recognition from Arm.  As a partner, they have been very supportive of our approach to innovation,” said Scott Casper, Director of Sales, GOWIN Semiconductor.  “The GW1NS family demonstrates incredible functionality and flexibility needed for the success of today’s system designs.  We are happy to be accelerating growth in this field.”