ARM Cortex-based processors secure IoT applications

The processors include two powerful cores on one chip. An ARM Cortex‑A9 supports speeds from 800MHz to 1GHz and can run sophisticated operating systems like Linux. A 200MHz Cortex‑M4 with floating point unit is optimized for real-time control and can run a real-time operating system (RTOS) for more deterministic behaviour.

An easy to configure power management system allows the multimedia features and system peripherals to consume minimum power while in either active, or low power modes. Multimedia performance for the Cortex‑A9 is enhanced by an ARM NEON Media processor Engine (MPE) with 32 64‑bit registers and 32 double-precision VFPv3 floating point registers.      

The processor supports connections to a variety of interfaces. Video supports is provided by an analog video input interface that supports both NTSC and PAL. A number of USB interfaces are provided including high-speed USB on-the-go with PHY, High-Speed (HS) USB host with PHY, and HS Inter-Chip USB. Multiple expansion card ports are provided including MMC/SDIO host.

Other ports include two Gigabit Ethernet controllers that support Ethernet AVB, a PCIe 2.0 interface, two 12-bit ADC modules with 4 dedicated single-ended inputs, two CAN ports, an ESAI audio interface, and a variety of other popular interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, and I2S serial audio interfaces.      

Expansion is provided with a 32-bit DDR3/LVDDR3/LPDDR2-800 memory interface with additional support for NAND Flash, NOR Flash, and OneNAND. Other interfaces are available for connecting peripherals such as WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS, displays, and camera sensors.     

The Freescale i.MX 6SoloX processor targets many applications including Internet of Things, industrial automation, wearable medical devices, test and measurement equipment, and vehicle‑to‑vehicle communications.