When MCU goes to high performance, MCU or MPU no longer need to tangle

As the heart of electronic products, microcontrollers (MCUs) are widely used in consumer and industrial electronics. Today, the development of industrial automation, next-generation vehicles, intelligent analytics and the Internet of Everything is pushing up the performance requirements for edge-side MCUs, and the performance of MCU products, real-time control capabilities, and the diversity of communication and high-speed real-time requirements are getting higher and higher. For example, in specific industrial applications: emerging applications require higher levels of system integration and edge intelligence; industrial and automotive systems rely on precise real-time control and decision making; and distributed communication and automation trends require higher network bandwidth ......

3 key technologies for achieving industrial automation

Industry 4.0 and industrial automation on a large scale, real-time control, industrial networking and edge analytics can be effective in automated factories to improve efficiency and productivity.

Real-time control: Because of the strict timing requirements of the system, when performing real-time control, the system needs to have raw data processing capabilities and the ability to control the signal within the exact timing required. Accurate control of analog signals is critical, and the process can be leveraged with improved control algorithms to increase motor drive reliability and EV efficiency. These processing requirements are beyond the capabilities of traditional MCUs.

Industrial networking: Plants need to exchange different types of data, so multiple industrial Ethernet standards must be rapidly adopted to support real-time communication between machines to improve system performance, safety and reliability. Therefore, an integrated network solution is needed that is not only compatible with many different protocol standards, but also operates at rates up to 1 Gbps.

Edge analytics: Improvements in machine learning algorithms can facilitate local optimization, where each machine or node can perform operations without waiting for centralized decisions. Edge processing can significantly reduce response times, leading to better and safer human-machine collaboration.

In many factory systems such as motor control and robotics, processors oversee the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion processes, but people's high-performance computing and control needs are demanding more from the processor's capabilities.

Recently, TI introduced the new Sitara AM2x series of MCUs to meet the challenges of system design with high computing power, high communication rates, and high reliability requirements.

Combine processor-level computing performance and MCU design simplicity

TI's Sitara brand history has been a long time, and has been widely used in the industrial field, AM2x series MCU is a new series of Sitara brand MCU, characterized by both processor-level computing performance of high computing power and MCU-level design convenience and ease of use.

MCU is a complete system, including CPU, flash memory and RAM and general control, such as motor control, power processing transformation and the need for fast IO control, real-time peripherals is the outstanding advantage of MCU; in addition, more and more MCU products will look at functional safety and information security, traditional MCU also join many information security-related gas pedals or co-processors, or integrate related functions.

The most important feature of traditional MPU processors is the high performance of CPU cores, which basically reach 1 GHz or more processor performance, and are mostly multi-core. By far, the largest share of MPUs on the market use high-order ARM processor cores. At the same time, MPUs will integrate high performance RAM, DDR interface to achieve high speed performance of the whole system memory and data throughput. As more and more arithmetic power is required on the MPU, the processor will internally integrate co-processors such as deep learning, DSP and real-time control cores inside. Processors require increasingly higher rates, real-time, and confidentiality of communication buses, and therefore increasingly integrate industrial communication interfaces, such as Gigabit Ethernet, TSN, and other high-speed communication cores required in industrial sites.

Sitara AM2x is a product that combines traditional MCU and traditional MPU. Texas Instruments (TI) China embedded and DLP ® application technology director Shi Ying introduced, TI will be high-performance ARM core, high-performance RAM, high-speed signal processing, industrial communications high-speed real-time bus interface integration, coupled with the MCU in the common function of security and information security functions and MCU unique real-time peripherals, so as to design the Sitara AM2x series MCU Compared to traditional flash-based MCU products, engineers can use the AM2x series to increase computing power by up to 10 times.

Low Power MCUs for Processor-Level Performance

The AM243x MCU is the first model in the AM2x family of devices to feature up to four Arm Cortex®-R5F cores, each running at up to 800 MHz. these four R5F Cortex cores, along with a number of internal gas pedals and co-processors, can deliver up to 6000 DMIPS of computing power.

In factory equipment such as robots, the fast computing power and high-speed access to the MCU's internal memory can simultaneously help improve the robot's motion accuracy and movement speed, thereby increasing productivity. In typical applications, the AM243x device can achieve 6000 DMIPS computational performance levels while consuming less than 1W of effective power.

Integrated design enables real-time control and multi-protocol network support at the edge

The Sitara AM243x MCU integrates sensing and drive peripherals that work with the processor to perform high-precision motor control or fast IO control tasks, enabling low-latency real-time processing and control for factory automation.

AM243x devices extend TI's support for multiple Gigabit Industrial Ethernet protocols and time-sensitive networks (TSN) to enable next-generation factory networks. With the AM243x, engineers can use the certified, TI directly provided protocol stack to fully support EtherNet/IP™, EtherCAT®, PROFINET® and IO-Link master and other industrial communication standards, while providing industrial automation customers with proprietary support to customize their unique set of TSN-based or private Industrial Ethernet-based protocols.

SIL3 compliant for safety

AM243x MCU on-chip security features support new encryption requirements, integrated functional security mechanisms, diagnostics and auxiliary functions to help system integrators in their industrial designs to meet the requirements of IEC 61508 standard Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 3, or Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL)-D, in line with the functional safety standards required by the industrial and automotive sectors.

TI integrated all the functions and performance on a single chip, allowing the AM2x series to achieve real-time control of industrial communications, analytical processing, information security and functional safety at the edge. At the same time, to further reduce the complexity of design and development, TI's official website also provides a lot of easy-to-use development tools, such as Sitara AM2x MCU evaluation kit AM243x LaunchPad, and software packages, SDK and other supporting special software; in addition, through MCU + Academy, a new online resource, engineers can define their own to In addition, through the MCU+ Academy, a new online resource, engineers can define their own learning content and course schedule to complete the learning of the processor and supporting tools and SDKs, thus helping engineers to accelerate their product design.

According to the introduction, for the AM243x series, TI can provide pre-production versions of AM2431, AM2432 and AM2434 in 17mm × 17mm or 11mm × 11mm packages, market positioning in industrial automation, PLC, motor control, robotic arm, robotics, or industrial multi-protocol and a wide range of high-speed communication interface applications.

Industrial applications involve a variety of end devices, different end devices have different requirements for electronic control systems. MCU or MPU, try Sitara AM2x MCU！