MCU with industrial communications and security up to 800MHz

Texas Instruments AM243x is an extension of Sitara’s industrial-grade portfolio into a high-performance MCU. The device is created for industrial applications, including motor drives and remote I/O modules, which need a combination of real-time communications and processing. The family offers scalable performance with up to four Cortex-R5F MCUs, one Cortex-M4F, and two instances of Sitara’s gigabit TSN-enabled PRU_ICSSG.

The SoC architecture was created to offer best-in-class real-time performance through the high-performance Arm Cortex-R5F cores, Tightly-Coupled Memory banks, configurable SRAM partitioning, and dedicated low-latency paths to and from peripherals for fast data movement in and out of the SoC. This deterministic architecture enables the device to handle the tight control loops seen in servo drives while the peripherals such as FSI, GPMC, ECAPs, PWMs, and encoder interfaces help allow several different architectures found in these systems.

The SoC offers flexible industrial communications capability, including full protocol stacks for EtherCAT target, EtherNet/IP adapter, PROFINET device, and IO-Link Controller. The PRU_ICSSG further offers the capability for gigabit and TSN-based protocols. Also, the PRU_ICSSG allows further interfaces, including a UART interface, sigma-delta decimation filters, and absolute encoder interfaces.

Functional safety features may be enabled via the integrated Cortex-M4F along with dedicated peripherals, which can all be isolated from the rest of the SoC. The device also supports secure boot.