Freescale adds ARM-based microcontroller line
R. Colin Johnson
EE Times
(06/22/2010 12:01 AM EDT)
PORTLAND, Ore. —Freescale Semiconductor Inc. Tuesday (June 22) introduced a new ARM-based microcontroller family, Kinetis, expanding its push into consumer and industrial markets with a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer architecture licensed from ARM Holdings plc.
Freescale (Austin, Texas) already has 32-bit microcontrollers using the Power instruction set architecture (ISA) developed with IBM, plus its own low-cost ColdFire+ microcontrollers. The new microcontroller line is intended to serve original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) standardizing on ARM cores across their applications.
"We already had experience with ARM cores for our i.MX multimedia applications processors based on ARM9, ARM11 and ARM Cortex-A8," said Jeff Bock, director of marketing for industrial and multi-market microcontrollers at Freescale.
"Our new Kinetis microcontrollers, however, will be the industry's first to use the new arm cortex-m4. And we did not just swap-in the cotex-m4 either, but added some Freescale secret sauce," Bock said. "Key additions include instruction and data caches that enhance performance, a special watchdog timer that enhances power management, plus a crossbar switch that allows multiple masters to communicate with multiple slaves simultaneously, such as the core reading data out of flash while the system SRAM is bringing DMA information in from the Ethernet port."
Kinetis devices are built using 90-nanometer thin-film storage technology with FlexMemory that can be configured by designers either as EEPROM or additional data or program memory. The Kinetis family includes all the mixed-signal, display and touch panel interface options as Freescale’s ColdFire+ microcontrollers, but with additional capabilities for efficient motor control and with support for audio and video processing tasks.
Selected models also support USB on-the-go, time-stamped Ethernet (IEEE 1588), floating-point math acceleration, hardware tamper detection, segment or graphical LCD control and DRAM control for extending main memory, Freescale said.
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