MCUs for developers’ functional safety applications

29th May 2014

Nat Bowers

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Expanding the company's portfolio of SafeTI design components, Texas Instruments has announced the 32-bit dual-core lockstep Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx microcontrollers for developers’ functional safety applications. System and software developers will enjoy an insightful, efficient and powerful debug experience for code profiling and greater execution visibility, enabled by integrated real-time instruction and data trace support.

Unique to the Hercules MCU platform, these two floating-point devices offer a 50% increase in computational performance over any of TI’s current ARM Cortex-R MCUs, allowing system designers to utilise a single Hercules MCU to replace several discrete MCUs or an FPGA-MCU combination. These Hercules MCUs also provide the largest available on-chip flash and RAM in the Hercules platform, along with several safety feature enhancements.

Easing development reuse and product scalability, the lockstep and cached MCUs are software- and pin-compatible with TI’s existing Hercules MCU portfolio. The Hercules RM57Lx MCUs help developers more easily and quickly meet IEC 61508 functional safety standards for a variety of applications, including railway signaling, aviation anti-skid, programmable logic controllers, motors and drives and medical equipment. The Hercules TMS570LCx MCUs will likewise help designers more easily and quickly meet the ISO 26262 functional safety standard for transportation applications like advanced driver assistance systems, domain control, electric propulsion systems, off-road vehicles.

Address greater application performance needs with lockstep ARM Cortex-R5 cores in a cached memory architecture with speeds up to 330MHz that delivers 550 peak DMIPS, 660 peak MIPS and up to 330 MFLOPS These MCUs help further improve system performance with a new memory architecture supporting additional parallel bus master accesses and a multi-port direct memory access (DMA) controller. Support ever-increasing application code size requirements and expand system functionality with the largest ECC enabled on-chip memory in the Hercules lineup with up to 4MB of integrated program Flash, 512KB of on-chip random access memory (RAM) and 128KB of data Flash for EEPROM emulation. Enable networking, data collection and field software upgrades with on-chip Ethernet, FlexRay and CAN connectivity.

TI's Hercules RM57Lx MCUs are priced at $28.32 (USD) and FlexRay-enabled, Q100 qualified Hercules TMS570LCx MCUs are $32.15 (USD) in 10,000 unit quantities and are immediately available for order in sample quantities. A variety of tools ranging from $199 to $3,699 (USD) (for full-featured real-time debug trace) and free software listed above are available today.