Arm application processors meet the needs of modern industry 4.0 processing

Texas Instruments AM654x and AM652x Sitara processors are Arm applications processors created to satisfy the complex processing demands of modern industry 4.0 embedded products.

The devices combine four or two Arm Cortex-A53 cores with a dual Arm Cortex-R5F MCU subsystem, which incorporates features aimed at helping customers deliver their functional safety goals for their end products and three Gigabit industrial communications subsystems (PRU_ICSSG) to produce an SoC capable of high-performance industrial controls with industrial connectivity and processing for functional safety applications. AM65xx is undergoing assessment to be certified by TÜV SÜD according to IEC 61508.

The four Arm Cortex-A53 cores in the AM654x are arranged in two dual-core clusters with shared L2 memory to produce two processing channels. The two Arm Cortex-A53 cores in the AM652x are provided in a single dual-core cluster and two single-core cluster options. Extensive ECC is incorporated on on-chip memory, peripherals, and interconnect for reliability. The SoC has features aimed at helping customers design systems that can accomplish their functional safety goals (assessment pending with TÜV SÜD). Cryptographic acceleration and secure boot are offered on some AM654x and AM652x devices and granular firewalls managed by the DMSC.

The Arm Cortex-A53 RISC CPUs offer programmability with Arm Neon extension, and the dual Arm Cortex-R5F MCU subsystem is provided for general-purpose usage as two cores, or it can be employed in lockstep to help fulfil the requirements of functional safety applications. The PRU_ICSSG subsystems can offer up to six ports of industrial Ethernet such as Profinet IRT, TSN, Ethernet/IP or EtherCAT (among many others), or they can be employed for standard Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

The company offers a complete set of software and development tools for the Arm cores, including Processor SDK Linux, Linux-RT, RTOS, and Android, and C compilers and a debugging interface for visibility into source code execution. Applicable functional safety and security documentation will be made available to help customers in developing functional safety or security-related systems.