Date: 22/10/2009

TI rolls out dozens of ARM processor core based MCUs

Texas Instruments has put into the field its new ARM core based MCU devices. In its renewed effort to gain share in the microcontroller market, it has acquired a smart MCU- only maker Luminary Micro in this year of 2009. Luminary had created a new wave by making available low cost 32-bit ARM based MCUs. Now a 32 bit microcontroller costing less than $1 is reality.

TI is rolling out new products through combined effort of acquired Luminary's team and its own.
TI has released 31 new ARM devices spanning Cortex-M3, Cortex-A8 and ARM9 family cores. 29 of this are Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3 technology-based microcontrollers. And the rest 2 are part of new family called Sitara with ARM9 and ARM Cortex-A8 processor cores.

The applications suggested for these MCU devices are industrial automation, test and measurement, medical instrumentation, HVAC, remote monitoring, motion control and point-of-sales.

The new Stellaris devices include unique Intellectual Property (IP) for motion control applications, intelligent analog functionality and expanded advanced connectivity options (10/100 Ethernet MAC+PHY, USB Host/Device, USB On-the-Go support, Bosch 2.0 A/B CAN support).

The Sitara family consists of two new Cortex-A8 technology-based devices (AM3505 and AM3517) available today. The features include CAN, USB 2.0, EMAC, universal parallel port, Display subsystem, and DDR2 memory support. AM3505 with an additional PowerVR SGX graphics engine provide accelerate 3D graphical user interfaces. The graphics engine can process up to 10 Mpolygons/sec and supports OPENGL ES 2.0.

These new MCUs are sampling in limited quantity with larger volumes slated for December 2009.

These product tells us the trend that, MCU prices are falling and the ARM is gaining the King status in Embedded Systems domain. ARM is the key enabler of low cost 32-bit embedded system design. In this domain ARM stronghold is comparable to Intel's X86 in PC space. Chipmakers continue to add more manufacturing enabled features to their ARM based MCUs to gain some competitive advantage. One more trend noticeable is designers would prefer to save coding time. So that their c-langauge code or assembly language code can be ported easily into new designs. ARM cores, irrespective of the chip maker, offer software-code compatibility to designers. This makes the designers attracted towards ARM core based devices.