TI Korea (CEO Kent Chon, www.ti.com/ww/kr ) May 26, 2014 – TI (CEO Kent Chon) announced the addition of new 32-bit dual-core lockstep Hercules™ RM57Lx and TMS570LCx microcontrollers (MCUs) to its SafeTI™ design package portfolio, which developers can use for 'functional safety' applications. These two newly added floating-point device families are part of the proprietary Hercules MCU platform and offer 50% improved computational performance compared to TI's existing ARM® Cortex™-R MCUs. This enables system designers to replace multiple discrete MCUs or FPGA-MCU combinations with a single Hercules MCU. Additionally, these MCUs provide the highest capacity on-chip flash and RAM for the Hercules platform and include numerous safety feature enhancements. It natively supports real-time command and data tracing, enabling system and software developers to perform intuitive and efficient debugging during code profiling.

This new lockstep cached MCU product facilitates development reuse and product expansion, and is software and pin compatible with TI's existing Hercules MCU portfolio. The Hercules RM57Lx MCU enables developers to more easily and quickly achieve IEC 61508 'functional safety' standards for various types of applications, including railway signaling, aircraft anti-slip systems, programmable logic controllers, motors and drives, and medical equipment. Likewise, the Hercules TMS570LCx MCU enables designers to more easily and quickly achieve ISO 26262 'functional safety' standards for transportation applications, such as advanced driver assistance systems, domain control, electric propulsion systems, and off-road vehicles.

The Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx MCUs can meet higher application performance demands by utilizing a lockstep ARM Cortex-R5 core with a cached memory architecture that achieves 550 peak DMIPS, 660 peak MIPS, and up to 330 MFLOPS at speeds up to 330 MHz. By using these MCU products, system performance can be further enhanced through a new memory architecture that supports additional parallel bus master access and a multi-port direct memory access (DMA) controller. In addition, by including up to 4MB of program flash, 512KB of on-chip RAM (random access memory), and 128KB of data flash for use in EEPROM emulation, the Hercules lineup provides the largest capacity of ECC-enabled on-chip memory, thereby meeting increasingly high application code size requirements and expanding system functionality.

By utilizing the Hercules MCU and the associated SafeTI design package (TI's safety-related semiconductor devices, quality assurance manufacturing processes, safety development processes, safety-related documentation, tools, and software), the time required to achieve IEC 61508 SIL-3 and ISO 26262 ASIL-D compliance and final product application certification can be shortened, and software development is facilitated by providing TI's diagnostic libraries and HALCoGen driver software. Additionally, TI provides MCAL supporting AUTOSAR 4.0.3 for the TMS570LC device. TI's ARM Compiler Verification Kit enables developers to document, analyze, verify, and compliantly use the TI ARM compiler to meet the requirements of IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 standards.

Furthermore, enhanced on-chip diagnostics can be used to simplify the design of 'functional safety' applications. Building upon the safety features of existing Hercules MCUs, these new device products add a new lockstep vectorized interrupt manager, new on-chip interconnect diagnostics, and extended memory protection for the CPU and bus master. These devices also include SEC-DED (single-bit error correction and double-bit error detection) capabilities via ECC for command and data caches and selected peripheral RAM buffers. By integrating Ethernet, FlexRay, and CAN connectivity on-chip, networking, data acquisition, and field software upgrades are enabled, and TI’s auxiliary TPS65381-Q1 multi-rail power supply (PMIC) product, which includes sensor power, “functional safety” diagnostics, and support documentation, can be used for “functional safety” designs requiring multiple power rails for SafeTI chipsets.

You can start development immediately using the Integrated Development Kit (TMDXRM57LHDK and TMDXTMS570LCHDK) including development boards, TI's Code Composer Studio™ IDE, Timer Coprocessor IDE, HALCoGen peripheral configuration tools, and Safety demos, enabling enhanced debugging through real-time tracing capabilities. The Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx MCUs support cycle-accurate command and data tracing capabilities with 6Gbps bandwidth via ARM's Embedded Trace Macrocell™ (ETM). The Hercules Trace Development Kit bundle is available for purchase now (PN: RM57-PROTRACE, 570LC-PROTRACE).