ARM Introduces Secure Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 ARMv8-M MCU Cores, and Bluetooth 5 Cordio Radio IP for IoT Applications

ARM TechCon 2016 is now taking place in Santa Clara, California, USA, as ARM has made three announcements for the Internet of Things, the focus of SoftBank going forward, with two ARM Cortex-M ARMv8-M cores integrating ARM TrustZone technology, namely Cortex-M23 low power small footprint core, and Cortex-M33 core with processing power similar to Cortex-M3/M4 cores, as well as Cordio Radio IP for Bluetooth 5 and 802.15.4 connectivity. ARM Cortex-M23 ARM Cortex-M23, based on the ARMv8-M baseline architecture, is the smallest and most energy efficient ARM processor with TrustZone security technology,and targets embedded applications requiring both a small footprint, low power, and security. Its power consumption is low enough to be used in batteryless, energy harvesting IoT nodes, and is roughly a third of Cortex-M33 processor size, and offers more than twice its energy efficiency. Cortex-M23 is a two-stage pipelined processor, software compatible with other processors in the Cortex-M family. […]

NXP Unveils MCUXpresso Development Tools for LPC and Kinetis Microcontrollers

After NXP bought Freescale, you had development tools for Freescale Kinetis MCUs such as Design Studio or Kenetis SDK, and others such as LPCXpresso for NXP LPC microcontrollers. The company has worked to unifying software and tools support between its ARM Cortex-M MCU families, and has now announced MCUXPresso software and tools for both NXP Kinetis and LPC MCUs. MCUXpresso unifies thousands of Kinetis and LPC microcontrollers under a set of compatible tools including MCUXpresso SDK – Open-source software MISRA-compliant development kit (SDK) with peripherals drivers, wireless & wired connectivity stacks, middleware, real-time OS, getting started guides, API documentation, and application examples. MCUXpresso IDE – Integrated development environment (IDE) for editing, compiling and debugging. It also integrates MCU-specific debugging views, code trace and profiling, multicore debugging, etc… Both free and professional edition of the IDE will be available, and LPCXpressor and previously Freescale Freedom & Tower platforms will be supported. […]

What’s the Cheapest MCU? My Try: Holtek HT48R002 8-bit MCU Selling for $0.085

Holtek_HT48R002

Somebody asked what was the cheapest MCU (Microcontroller) available on Google+, so I thought it would be fun to find the cheapest one regardless of specifications. It turns out there an older thread with this very question on StackExchange, and at the time (2011) Microchip PIC10F200 8-bit MCU with 256B RAM in SOP-23 package was the cheapest one among the answer, and somehow the price has not changed as it’s still $0.32 per unit for 1k orders. Not a bad price, but back in the days when I wrote on CD and DVD players, we had some price pressure from customers, so we looked for a cheaper microcontroller, and ended up using Holtek because of the competitive pricing. We suffered a bit during development due to incomplete documentation but eventually did the job. Anyway, I went to the Holtek website and found a “cost-effective I/O MCU” category, and HT48R002 appears […]

Samsung JerryScript is a Lightweight Open Source JavaScript Engine for the Internet of Things

In the old days, micro-controller programming was all done in assembly or C, but in recent years higher level languages, included interpreted ones such as Python and JavaScript, have made their ways into MCUs with projects such as MicroPython or Espruino (JS) often running on STMicro STM32 ARM Cortex M micro-controllers, but also other platforms such as ESP8266. As I browsed through the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016 schedule, I discovered that Samsung worked on it own implementation of a JavaScript engine for the Internet of Things: JerryScript. It is a full implementation of ECMAScript 5.1 standard written in C that can run on micro-controllers with less than 64KB RAM, and less than 200KB storage (160KB footprint with ARM Thumb-2 compilation). JerryScript is comprised of two main components: Parser and Virtual Machine (VM), with the parser performing translation of input ECMAScript application into byte-code than is then executed by the Virtual […]

SiFive Introduces Freedom U500 and E500 Open Source RISC-V SoCs

Open source used to be a software thing, with the hardware design being kept secret for fear of being copied, but companies such as Texas Instruments realized that from a silicon vendor perspective it would make perfect sense to release open source hardware designs with full schematics, Gerber files and SoM, to allow smaller companies and hobbyists, as well as the education market, normally not having the options to go through standard sales channels and the FAE (Field Application Engineer) support, to experiment with the platform and potentially come up with commercial products. That’s exactly what they did with the Beagleboard community, but there’s still an element that’s closed source, albeit documented: the processor itself. But this could change soon, as SiFive, a startup founded by the creators of the free and open RISC-V architecture, has announced two open source SoCs with Freedom U500 processor and Freedom E300 micro-controller. Freedom […]

Fireduino Arduino Compatible Board Features Rockchip RKnanoD Dual Core Cortex-M3 MCU (Crowdfunding)

Rockchip RKNanoD dual core Cortex M3 micro-controller was introduced last year for IoT and audio applications, and the Firefly team, known for their FirePrime or Firefly-RK3288 development boards, has designed an Arduino compatible board based on the MCU with lots of audio ports, Arduino headers, and WiFi connectivity. Fireduino specifications: MCU – Rockchip RKnanoD dual core ARM Cortex M3 MCU @ up to 250 MHz (system core) / 500 MHz (calculate core) with respectively 640 KB and 384 KB RAM Storage – 4 or 8MB SPI flash + micro SD slot Audio 24-bit/192 KHz audio codec (built in MCU) with HW accelerator for APE, FLAC, OGG, and MP3 audio decoding 1x 3.5mm analog audio jack 2x 3.5mm LINE In jacks 1x On-board microphone DLNA wireless audio support Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n WiFi via Ampak AP6181 module Expansion Arduino header with I2C, SPI, ADC, GPIO, PWM, UART LCD interface (Intel 8080 […]

STMicro Unveils Two Low Cost STM32F7 ARM Cortex M7 Development Boards

STMicroelectronics introduiced its STM32F7 ARM Cortex M7 micro-controller family in 2014, and they released a $49 STM32F746G discovery board later in 2015. The company has now launched two new low cost development boards with the $23 STM32 Nucleo-144 board based on STM32F767 MCU, and a $79 Discovery Kit powered by STM32F746 MCU with TFT-LCD and MIPI-DSI support. STM32 Nucleo-144 development board Key feature of NUCLEO-F767ZI board: MCU – STMicro STM32F767ZI ARM Cortex M7 microcontroller @ 216 MHz with FPU, DSP, MMU, 2MB flash, 512 KB SRAM, 16 KB instruction TCM RAM (for critical real-time routines), and 4 KB backup SRAM Connectivity – IEEE-802.3-2002 compliant Ethernet connector USB – 1x micro USB OTG or full speed device  Extension: ST Zio connector including support for Arduino UNO v3 connectivity, and additional signals (A6 to A8, D16 to D72) ST morpho extension pin header footprints for full access to all STM32 I/Os On-board […]

Getting Started with MPLAB Xpress Board and Online IDE

Microchip launched MPLAB Xpress online IDE and board earlier this year, and as part of the launch they offered 2,000 free boards. I joined the program and received my board. The keyword for the board is “Xpress”, as you should be able to get started in mere minutes thanks to the operating system agnostic online IDE that works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. That also means you don’t need to install any other tool. All you need is a web browser. MPLAB Xpress Board Let’s start by quickly checking out the package, board, and offline documentation. Once you open the package, you’ll get the board, a folded sheet of paper for the schematics, and some information on the package itself with the pinout diagram, and a quick start guide explaining that the board acts as a mass storage device, and all you need is a web browser for […]

Exit mobile version
EDATEC Raspberry Pi 5 fanless case