Cortex-M1 is ARM's soft core aimed at FPGA. It is similar to Cortex-M3 and supports the Thumb-2 instruction set and the advanced microcontroller features such as the clever interrupt latency reduction technology. Cortex-M3 is most well known through Luminary Micro. After initially supporting Actel, late last year ARM announced the availability of its soft core Cortex-M1 for Altera Cyclone 3. Priced at US$2500 including a netlist of the core and software development tools, this is a great solution for those wanting to put a CPU and logic into the same chip. Altera also provides its NIOS 32-bit CPU for its FPGA. Integration of Cortex-M1 provides access to the huge range of ARM tools and software support available, on a widely used FPGA family. This should be an interesting development. ARM also supports other FPGA - see their FPGA page for full details.

We are working on a high resolution network camera called 'Bigeye'. The intended use is for security and monitoring applications where full remote operation is required. Bigeye can operate either with power-over-Ethernet, or using WiFi, and can take high quality pictures at 3 Megapixels (about 10x the resolution of a a standard IP camera). Built in features include IR motion sensing, day / night operation, internal 1GB storage, 802.11b/g networking, GPIOs for control and sensing and expansion for things like temperature and tamper sensors.