Kinetis microcontrollers operate at frequencies as high as 200 MHz

Colin Holland, EE Times -- EDN, December 1, 2011

Freescale Semiconductor has introduced the Kinetis series of microcontrollers with an operating frequency as high as 200 MHz. Employing an ARM Cortex-M4 core and DSP and floating-point instructions, the X series includes 1 to 4 Mbytes of flash memory and 0.5 Mbyte of SRAM, with multiple off-chip memory options also available for expansion head room. The X series offers an advanced suite of connectivity, security, and HMI (human-machine-interface) peripherals, all with Freescale’s bundled software enablement. This combination of processing performance, feature integration, and support makes the Kinetis X series optimal for automation applications, point-of-sale systems, medical instrumentation, test-and-measurement equipment, and systems with an HMI.

The Kinetis X series includes several hardware-acceleration techniques to maximize system performance by freeing the core from memory-access limitations and peripheral-servicing constraints. These techniques include large on-chip instruction and data caches that maximize CPU efficiency, 32 kbytes of tightly coupled SRAM for single-cycle access to scratchpad data, and a 64-channel DMA (direct-memory-access) controller that offloads general peripheral and memory-servicing tasks from the CPU. The X series also includes a 64-bit AXI (Advanced Extensible Interface) bus that increases concurrent data-transfer capabilities from several bus masters.

According to Geoff Lees, vice president of Freescale’s industrial and multimarket-microcontroller business, factory automation is driving up performance. “We have seen some customers starting to look at application processors, but they realize that a Linux system does not provide the real-time capabilities,” he says. Kinetis X allows you to address virtually any type of external memory, including NOR and NAND flash, serial flash, SRAM, and low-power DDR2 and DDR3. The devices also allow you to perform XIP (execute-in-place) functions from NOR or quad-SPI flash.

To enable the acquisition requires the secure, real-time process and display of a large number of system parameters. Kinetis X series addresses these requirements with Ethernet, high-speed USB OTG (On-The-Go), CAN (controller-area-network), I²S (inter-IC-sound), and serial-communication interfaces, as well as cryptographic acceleration and tamper-detection units.

Applications that require a GUI (graphical user interface) can select from a low-power segment LCD or graphics-LCD controller. The on-chip SRAM supports graphics-LCD panels with resolution as high as 432×240 pixels without an external frame buffer. You can increase this resolution using external, 8-bit DRAM. To aid the development of embedded GUIs, the Portable Embedded GUI WindowBuilder suite and a low-resource eGUI LCD driver are available.

Software and tool support includes Freescale’s MQX real-time operating system with integrated TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and USB stacks and support for low-cost or free graphics LCD and encryption plug-ins. The devices also bundle the Eclipse-based CodeWarrior 10.x integrated development environment with Processor Expert, providing a visual, automated framework to accelerate the development of complex embedded systems.

Kinetis Tower System modules and a growing range of Tower System peripheral modules, including Wi-Fi, sensing, and precision analog, also ease design. The ARM ecosystem, including development tools from IAR Systems, Keil, and Green Hills, also provides support. Freescale plans to introduce a software-development platform before the arrival of silicon to reduce customers’ software-development-cycle time. This announcement follows a similar one that accompanied the introduction of a platform that integrated ARM Cortex-M4 and -A5 cores. A bundle includes Freescale or third-party tools, and testing for compatibility is under way.

Freescale