Luminary Micro Demonstrates 4th Generation of Stellaris Family Products on a New Development Platform

In addition to enabling access to the rich features of the latest Stellaris microcontroller family members – including simultaneous interfaces for Ethernet MAC/PHY, USB On-The-Go, and Controller Area Network – the DK-LM3S9B96 adds several features that enhances the overall user experience, such as an integrated 3.5-inch colour QVGA LCD graphics display with a resistive touch interface, a thumbwheel potentiometer (for menu navigation), a MicroSD card slot, 1 MB of serial Flash memory, precision 3V analog reference voltage, user LED and pushbutton, and I/O wired to convenient break-out pads. Moreover, the DK-LM3S9B96 takes full advantage of the Stellaris family’s new versatile External Peripheral Interface with an 8 MB SDRAM memory module attachment and the new Integrated Interchip Sound (I2S) Interface with an external audio codec and interface supporting line in/out, microphone in, and headphone out.

The Stellaris DK-LM3S9B96 features the fully integrated Stellaris LM3S9B96 MCU (also announced today). The LM3S9B96 microcontroller is based on the new low-power revision of the ARM Cortex-M3 controller core operating at up to 80 MHz, with 256 KB flash, 96 KB SRAM, a 32-channel DMA, a 32-bit external peripheral interface, a 16MHz internal 1% precision oscillator, and on-chip ROM preloaded with the royalty-free StellarisWare™ Peripheral Driver Library, Boot Loader, AES encryption lookup tables, a cyclical redundancy check (CRC) function, and the SafeRTOS kernel for general RTOS and safety critical applications. The LM3S9B96 also features real-time industrial connectivity, with a 10/100 Ethernet MAC/PHY, 2 CAN controllers, USB 2.0 Full Speed OTG/Host/Device, 2 SSI / SPI controllers, 2 I2C interfaces, an I2S interface, and 3 UARTs, as well as hardware-assisted support for synchronized industrial networks utilizing the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). The LM3S9B96 microcontroller also features advanced motion control features, including 8 motion-control PWM outputs with dead-band timers, two quadrature encoder inputs for precise position monitoring, and 4 fault protection inputs for low-latency shutdown. The microcontroller also features intelligent analog capability, including 3 analog comparators and 16 channels of highly accurate 10-bit analog-to-digital conversion - with the ability to sample two channels simultaneously at speeds of 1M samples per second. Finally, the LM3S9B96 microcontroller provides 16 digital comparators, a 24-bit Systick timer, four 32-bit or eight 16-bit general-purpose timers, 2 watchdog timers with different clock sources, a low drop-out voltage regulator so that only one supply voltage is required, brown-out reset, power-on reset controller, and up to 65 GPIOs.

The feature-rich DK-LM3S9B96 development kit includes the development board, all required cables (JTAG, Ethernet, USB, USB OTG-to-Host and USB OTG-to Device cables), four different evaluation tools suites for popular development tools, documentation, a complete StellarisWare Firmware Development Package (including the free StellarisWare Driver Library, Boot Loader, Graphics Library, and USB Library), a USB Flash Drive, a microSD Card, an 8 MB SDRAM memory module, and a breakout board for the External Peripheral Interface - everything a developer needs to get up and running in 10 minutes or less, for a superb out-of-the-box experience. The kit spans the design spectrum from evaluation to prototyping to application-specific design by functioning both as a development platform and as a serial in-circuit debug interface for any Stellaris microcontroller-based target board.

Software tools suite choices included in the kit include evaluation versions of ARM RealView Microcontroller Development kit (MDK), IAR Embedded Workbench Kickstart Edition, Code Red Technologies Red Suite, and CodeSourcery Sourcery G++ GNU tools. In addition to the ROM-based SafeRTOS included in the LM3S9B96 microcontroller, ported demos of RTOSes include FreeRTOS.org, Micrium µC/OS-II with µC/Probe embedded system monitoring, Express Logic ThreadX, CMX Systems CMX-RTX, Keil RTX, IAR PowerPac, SEGGER embOS, Quadros RTXC, MicroDigital’s SMX, RoweBot’s Unison Ultra Tiny Embedded Linux and POSIX Compatible RTOS, and SCIOPTA’s real-time operating system for safety-critical applications. Communications stacks available for the new kit and microcontrollers include Express Logic USBX; Micriμm μC/USB Device, μC/USB Host, μC/Modbus and μC/CAN protocol stacks; CMX Systems CMX-MicroNet, CMX-USB Device, and CMX-CANopen protocol stacks; Quadros RTXCusb Host and Device stacks, CANopenRT CAN stack, and QuadNet TCP/IP stack; SEGGER emUSB Device stack and embOS/IP TCP/IP stack; MicroDigital smxUSBD Device stack, smxUSBH Host stack, and smxUSBO On-The-Go (OTG) stack; port GmbH CANopen Library for Stellaris Microcontrollers; and zhaw PTPv2 stack.