Texas Instruments has increased the range and performance of its ARM Cortex-based microcontrollers for safety-critical applications.

The RM4x family of MCUs is based on dual ARM Cortex-R4F floating-point cores with clock speeds up 220MHz.

This is the supplier’s highest performance safety-critical microcontroller for industrial automation, servo drives and medical instrumentation.

It supports single and double precision floating-point operation to execute complex algorithms.

Its safety specification is the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61508 SIL-3 safety standard.

There is alao an Ethernet interface along with CAN and USB, and up to 3Mbyte flash and 256kbyte on-chip RAM.

It joins TI’s existing Cortex-based safety microcontrollers, the TMS570 and TMS470M families, and all three will be marketed under one platform called Hercules.

All the MCUs implement safety features in dedicated hardware to detect random faults and protect against systematic faults.

The dual ARM Cortex-R4F floating-point cores in lockstep, used in the TMS5709 and RM4x families provide on-line diagnostic features.

There is CPU and RAM built-in-self-test for detection of potential latent faults without software overhead and there is memory protection.

Error correction code for flash and RAM with single and double bit error detection evaluated in the lockstep CPUs “without performance impact”, said the supplier.
 
The TMS570 MCUs run at up to 180MHz based on dual ARM Cortex-R4F floating-point cores in lockstep. 

They are capable of achieving ISO 26262 ASIL-D and IEC 61508 SIL-3 safety standards and is AEC-Q100 qualified to satisfy automotive requirements.

It has an automotive temperature range up to 125 deg C.

Hercules TMS470M MCU family runs at up to 80MHz based on an ARM Cortex-M3 core. It is AEC-Q100 qualified to satisfy automotive requirements and support for IEC 61508 system safety requirements.
 
The MCUs have 320 – 640kbyte flash and 16 – 48kbyte RAM.

www.ti.com/hercules-pr-lp