DSP, Micros & Memory


Microcontrollers offer 32-bit performance at 8/16-bit price point

30 May 2007 DSP, Micros & Memory

Luminary Micro designs, markets, and sells ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers (MCUs).

As ARM's lead partner for Cortex-M3 technology, Luminary Micro delivered the world's first silicon implementation of the Cortex-M3 processor, which provides 32-bit performance at 8-/16-bit cost.

Luminary Micro's Stellaris family of microcontrollers incorporates the ARM Cortex-M3 MCU core running up to 50 MHz, embedded Flash and SRAM, a low-dropout voltage regulator, integrated brown-out reset and power-on reset functions, analog comparators, 10-bit ADC, SSI, GPIOs, watchdog and general purpose timers, UARTs, I²C, motion control PWMs, and quadrature encoder inputs.

With peripherals provided directly to the pins without feature multiplexing, this rich feature set is ideal for applications such as building and home automation; factory automation and control; industrial control power devices; stepper motors; brushed and brushless DC motors; and AC induction motors.

Why choose ARM architecture?

Some advantages are:

* Embedded microcontroller system designers are now able to have 32-bit performance for the same cost as their current 8- and 16-bit microcontroller designs.

* Luminary's Stellaris product line allows for standardisation that eliminates future architectural upgrades or software tools changes.

* With an ARM-based embedded market that is currently shipping at a rate of greater than 2,5 billion processors per year, the ARM ecosystem of third-party tools and solutions providers is the largest in the world.

* With the ARM Cortex architecture, designers have access to an instruction-set-compatible family that ranges from $1 to 1 GHz, an architecture that offers a large breadth of performance with instruction set compatibility.

The Cortex-M3

Cortex-M3 is the microcontroller version of ARM's new V7 instruction set architecture family of cores.

It is: optimised for single-cycle flash usage; deterministic, fast interrupt processing - always 12 cycles, or just six cycles with tail-chaining; three sleep modes with clock gating for low power; single-cycle multiply instruction and hardware divide; atomic operations; ARM Thumb2 mixed 16-/32-bit instruction set; 1,25 DMIPS/MHz - better than ARM7 and ARM9; extra debug support including data watchpoints and flash patching.

For capabilities beyond ARM7 for the MCU market: it requires half the flash (code space) of ARM7 applications; 2-4 times faster on MCU control applications; no assembly code ever required.



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