Texas Instruments has augmented its Hercules MCU line with the addition of its RM57Lx and TMS570LCx MCUs, which feature two ARM Cortex-R5F floating-point CPUs operating in lockstep. The new MCU lines offer additional on-chip flash and RAM as well as a 50% performance increase over earlier TI Cortex-R-based MCUs. The new families are intended to accelerate development of applications required to meet functional safety standards in industrial, medical and transportation markets.
The new MCUs are designed to address increased performance requirements for safety applications — boosting clock rate up to 330MHz while increasing integrated program flash to 4 MB, on-chip RAM to 512 KB, and data flash for EEPROM emulation up to 128 KB. Intended for industrial and medical safety applications, the RM57Lx offers up to 550 peak DMIPS and is intended for applications required to meet IEC 61508 SIL-3 functional safety standards. The TMS570LCx MCU line offers up to 480 peak DMIPS and features hardware support for safety applications required to comply with the ISO 26262 ASIL-D transportation functional safety standard.
Key safety features include:
•Dual-Core Lockstep CPUs with ECC-Protected Caches
•ECC on Flash and RAM Interfaces
•Built-In Self-Test (BIST) for CPU and On-Chip RAMs
•Error Signaling Module (ESM) with Error Pin
•Voltage and Clock Monitoring
The new devices offer diverse on-chip peripherals for I/O, communications and timing including FlexRay for TMS570LCx MCUs. Both new MCU lines extend earlier Hercules features with increased channels in their two 10- and 12-bit multibuffered ADC modules, an increase in available DMA channels to 32 and three new on-die temperature sensors. The new devices also bring out ARM’s Embedded Trace Macrocell (ETM) capability, enabling cost-effective support for cycle-accurate instruction and data trace.
New Hercules RM57Lx MCUs are priced at $28.32 USD and FlexRay-enabled, Q100 qualified Hercules TMS570LCx MCUs are $32.15 USD in 10KU quantities and are immediately available for order in sample quantities. For development, TI offers a wide range of development options including software, tools and starter kits. MCU-series-specific development kits are available now for $199 and the full-featured real-time debug trace kit is available for $3,699.
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