Freescale claims ‘fastest’ ARM Cortex-M microcontroller
Richard Wilson
Tuesday 08 November 2011 15:51
Freescale Semiconductor’s latest microcontroller is its fastest ARM Cortex-M processor-based MCU.
Company has upped the clock frequency of the Cortex-M4 core up to 200MHz for its Kinetis X series microcontrollers.
“The Kinetis X series provides a level of performance, memory and feature integration not previously seen in this class of MCUs and gives our customers the design flexibility they need to stay at the forefront of their markets,” said Geoff Lees, v-p of Freescale’s industrial and multi-market MCU business.
Hardware accelerators include on-chip instruction and data caches, 32kbyte of tightly coupled SRAM for single-cycle access to scratchpad data and a 64-channel DMA controller that offloads general peripheral and memory servicing tasks from the CPU.
The X series also includes a 64-bit AXI bus, a first in Cortex-M class MCUs, that increases concurrent data transfer capabilities from several bus masters.
For internal memory the MCUs have 1-4 Mbyte of flash and 0.5Mbyte of SRAM. The SRAM supports graphics LCD panels of up to WQVGA resolution without the need for an external frame buffer. If required, this can easily be expanded to accommodate higher-resolution panels using external, low-cost 8-bit DRAM.
There is peripheral support for Ethernet, high-speed USB On-The-Go, CAN, IIS and serial communication interfaces, as well as cryptographic acceleration and tamper detection units.
Applications that require a graphical user interface (GUI) can select from a low-power segment LCD or graphics LCD controller.
www.freescale.com
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