Texas Instruments has been quick to follow up its acquisition of
ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller firm Luminary Micro with the launch
of four development kits supporting the fourth generation of the
Cortex-M3-based Stellaris MCUs.
TI has made clear its plans to waste no time in getting its brand
established in the fast-growing Cortex-M3-based microcontroller
market.
Within weeks of last month's
acquisition of Luminary Micro, the
semiconductor company has moved to expand its ARM-based
microcontroller product offering in mainstream 32-bit MCU markets
where the Cortex-M3 processor is gaining wide market
acceptance.
TI's reecently acquired interest in this 32-bit MCU market will
bring it into direct competition with leading Cortex-M3-based MCU
suppliers STMicroelectronics,
NXP and Atmel.
The other 32-bit MCUs include Microchip's and Toshiba's
MIPS-based devices and Renesas Technology's SH families as well as
the recently announced RX610 family.
One of the biggest suppliers of 32-bit MCUs is NEC which has a
wide range of V850ES/HE3 microcontrollers. While, Freescale has a
series of ARM-based chips as well as its own ColdFire and Power
Architecture MCUs.
If TI brings its resources, in design and marketing into play, it
will shake up the Cortex-M3 MCU market, which will in turn impact
the wider 32-bit MCU market.
The leading Cortex-M3 chip supplier is ST which has 75 versions of
the MCU across all its STM32 families with pin-to-pin and software
compatibility.
TI matches this with the 140 versions of the Stellaris MCU it
acquired with Luminary Micro.
The MCU market is so wide and diverse that it is necessary to
offer multiple versions of any chip to meet the rnage of design
requirements in markets as diverse as automotive, industrial and
consumer.
Arguably TI will now have the resources to support the full range
of Cortex devices in a way that Luminary, a much smaller
company, would have found difficult.
TI has now introduced the first Stellaris products in its name,
these are development kits first announced by Luminary
in March.
Starting at $99, the two evaluation kits, one development kit and
one reference design kit each contains an 80MHz Stellaris MCU with
256K flash, 96K SRAM, StellarisWare software in ROM, as well as
integrated Ethernet, USB On-the-Go (OTG)/Host/Device and CAN.
The Stellaris LM3S9B90 and LM3S9B92 Ethernet and USB-OTG evaluation
kits include an In-Circuit Debug Interface board and the 36x102mm
EK-LM3S9B90 or EK-LM3S9B92 evaluation board.
The 80MHz LM3S9B90 MCU features a hibernation module for extended
periods of inactivity and for applications requiring more
simultaneous access to peripherals and advanced motion control, the
80 MHz LM3S9B92 MCU features eight PWM outputs for motion and
energy and two Quadrature Encoder Inputs (QEI) modules.
The DLK-LM3S9B96 development kit includes a 3.5-inch landscape QVGA
TFT colour LCD graphics display and thumbwheel potentiometer for
simple menu navigation.
SafeRTOS in ROM can be used as a standard operating system or as
part of a high integrity application requiring IEC61508 or
FDA510(k) certification.
There is a lso a single board computer intelligent display
reference design kit (RDK-IDM-SBC) includes a Human Machine
Interface (HMI) touch display panel for embedded control
devices.
The 80MHz Stellaris LM3S9B92 MCU in addition to extended
board-level memories including 8Mbyte SDRAM, 1Mbyte Serial Flash,
USB Host connector for external mass storage, and a MicroSD card
slot for image, data and code storage.