Fujitsu To Present ARM Cortex-M Solutions At Embedded World 2013

F

M Family for industrial solutions

“FM” is an abbreviation of “Fujitsu Cortex-M”, Fujitsu’s ARM Cortex-M based microcontroller platform for industrial markets. The FM product family is designed as a universal platform, with packages from 32 to 176 pins and Flash memory sizes from 64 KB to 1.5 MB. It consists of more than 450 immediately-available members of the FM3 family, plus FM4 and FM0+ family members that will be available in sample quantities from spring and summer 2013, respectively.

The FM Family offers a wide operating voltage range, including real 5 V operation. Industrial network interfaces include up to 2 channels each of CAN, USB and Ethernet – a world first. Most products feature sophisticated structures for inverter control (one MCU can control up to three inverters or one multi-level inverter), targeting drives in the industrial automation and home appliance sectors. Another focus is low-power operation, with a dedicated group of products targeting sensors and handheld devices.

Fujitsu’s strategy of providing dedicated FM solutions aims to significantly reduce development times and provide competitive advantages to its customers.

FMtouch

FMtouch is a solution package for capacitive touch applications such as touch buttons, sliders, scroll wheels, x/y matrices and proximity sensing based on any member of the FM Family. The platform is optimised for use in industrial or medical applications and in white goods. Its patent-pending, hardware-accelerated capacitive touch sensing uses one ADC input pin per touch channel and offers high sensitivity (<<10fF), a high dynamic range and a high signal-to-noise-ratio. It includes in-built automatic offset calibration and crosstalk suppression, and is also capable of handling thick front panels or front panels composed of several layers. Capacitive touch functionality can run on the application’s central FM MCU and can therefore be integrated without additional cost. The FMtouch solution consists of a dedicated firmware library plus a Windows-based development GUI; available documentation includes application notes on real-world FMtouch integration as well as software examples. Dedicated starter kits include initial hardware to enable rapid project ramp-up.

FMconnect USB

The FMconnect USB solution is a set of software components, tools, documentation and development boards packaged to enable rapid implementation of USB in embedded applications. At its core is the PC-based ‘Fujitsu USB Wizard’ GUI, which uses a simple 3-step approach to help generate USB-related firmware code. The package supports multiple out-of-the-box embedded USB solutions, as well as two USB interfaces per MCU and both Host and Device use cases. The host functions cover features such as HID mouse and keyboard or USB mass storage, while device functions include Virtual COM, HID mouse, joystick/data communication and libusb COM.

FMconnect Ethernet

Fujitsu’s FMconnect Ethernet solutions package supports specific devices of the FM3 family featuring up to two Ethernet channels per device. It utilizes proven open source components such as the lwIP TCP/IP stack as well as in-house developments such as the L3 FM low-level library. This is a key feature, since Ethernet-based communication requires significantly more development effort than simple serial connections such as UART or I2C. In this area, Fujitsu focuses on accelerating the development process by providing tailored low-level drivers, software modules and protocol stacks, as well as dedicated development boards. This enables the rapid implementation of applications such as web-based diagnosis or maintenance interfaces for industrial devices.

FMinverter

FMinverter is a solution for controlling 3-phase motors like PMSM with FM Family MCUs. The package consists of firmware for a range of motor and control types, a graphical GUI for parameterisation, documentation, scenario-specific software examples, dedicated starter kits, support services and a workshop programme. FSEU technical experts can provide customer support for projects involving non-mainstream motor drives or multi-inverter structures.