Freescale Semiconductor has introduced an ARM Cortex-M4 core based microcontroller family tuned for PC-style graphics in industrial LCD applications.
According to Freescale, graphics LCD interfaces are starting to replace traditional LED and segment LCD displays in many industrial applications.
The Kinetis K70 family has integrated graphics LCD controller, 1Mbyte of flash memory and 128kbyte of SRAM, enabling it to drive LCD panels at 8-bit QVGA resolution without the cost and complexity of adding external program and frame buffer memory.
If needed, displays of up to 24-bit SVGA resolution can also be supported with external memory.
With a 120/150 MHz ARM Cortex-M4 core, hardware floating point unit and crossbar architecture, there is processing headroom for graphics processing along with the simultaneous management of real-time control and communications functions typically required by HMI applications.
"The K70 is our most feature-rich Kinetis family to date," said Geoff Lees, vice president of Freescale's Industrial and Multi-Market MCU business.
"Graphics LCD capability was the logical next step in the evolution of the Kinetis feature set. It allows developers to add attractive, multi-function user interfaces to their designs quickly and with minimal cost," said Lees.
For the Kinetis K70 family there is an embedded graphic user interface (PEG) graphics development suite, which is a visual layout and design tool for creating graphic user interfaces (GUIs) within a PC-based environment.
The graphics interface design tool, dubbed WindowBuilder, allows for the layout of GUI screens and controls in a PC environment exactly as they would appear on the end product display.
"The resulting C++ source code is then automatically generated and ready to be compiled and linked into the end application," said Freescale.
Engineering samples of the Kinetis K70 120 MHz MCU with 1 MB of flash memory are now available in a 256 MAPBGA package.
Additional family members are planned to be available in early 2012, with full production planned for May.
The Tower System TWR-K70F120M module is now available to order, and the TWR-K60F120M and TWR-LCD-RGB modules are expected to be available in Q1 2012.
www.freescale.com/kinetis