TI introduces fastest Hercules microcontroller

Adding to its portfolio of SafeTI design components, today Texas Instruments Incorporated introduces its latest 32-bit dual-core lockstep Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx microcontrollers (MCUs) for developers’ functional safety applications. Unique to the Hercules MCU platform, these two new floating-point devices offer a 50 percent increase in computational performance over any of TI’s current ARM® Cortex™-R MCUs, allowing system designers to utilize a single Hercules MCU to replace several discrete MCUs or an FPGA-MCU combination. These new Hercules MCUs also provide the largest available on-chip flash and RAM in the Hercules platform, along with several safety feature enhancements. 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.

Easing development reuse and product scalability, the new lockstep and cached MCUs are software- and pin-compatible with TI’s existing Hercules MCU portfolio. The new 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 new 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 and off-road vehicles.

Features and benefits of the new Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx MCUs:

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 4 MB of integrated program Flash, 512 KB of on-chip random access memory (RAM) and 128 KB of data Flash for EEPROM emulation.

Accelerate IEC 61508 SIL-3 and ISO 26262 ASIL-D compliance and end product application certification with Hercules MCUs and the accompanying SafeTI design package components, which includes: TI’s safety-related semiconductor components, quality manufacturing process, safety development process, safety-related documents, tools and software.

Ease software development with TI’s diagnostics library and HALCoGen driver software. In addition, TI provides MCAL supporting AUTOSAR 4.0.3 for the TMS570LC devices. TI’s ARM Compiler Qualification Kit helps developers document, analyze, validate and qualify use of the TI ARM compiler to help meet the requirements of the IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 standards.

Simplify functional safety application design with enhanced on-chip diagnostics. Building on current Hercules MCU safety features, the new devices add a new lockstep vectored interrupt manager, new on chip interconnect diagnostics and expanded memory protection for the CPU and bus masters. These devices also include single-bit error correction and double-bit error detection via ECC for instruction and data caches and select peripheral RAM buffers.

Enable networking, data collection and field software upgrades with on-chip Ethernet, FlexRay and CAN connectivity.

Utilize TI’s complementary TPS65381-Q1 multi-rail power supply (PMIC) for a SafeTI chipset for functional safety designs requiring multiple power supply rails, integrated sensor supply, functional safety diagnostics and supporting documentation.

Jumpstart development with full-featured Hercules Development Kits (TMDXRM57LHDK or TMDXTMS570LCHDK) that include a development board, TI’s Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE), timer coprocessor IDE, HALCoGen peripheral configuration tool and safety demo.

Gain enhanced debug experience with out-of-the-box real-time trace capabilities. Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx MCUs support cycle-accurate instruction and data trace capability via ARM’s Embedded Trace Macrocell™ (ETM) at 6 Gbps bandwidth. Get a Hercules Trace Development Kit bundle today (PN: RM57-PROTRACE, 570LC-PROTRACE).