A new Era for the Cortex-M at Texas Instruments?
15
Apr
2015
While TI has slowly shrunk the Tiva (former Luminary Micro) families, it has sampled a few weeks ago a Cortex-M4F part. Guess in which top level family the Cortex M4F has landed? Well, the Cortex-M3 was already present in the high performance C2000 family where it shared space with the C28 core; but now, the Cortex-M4F has it all for itself in the new MSP432 – Low power / Performance portfolio. The device claimed the lowest EEMBC ULP benchmark but has since been passed by the Atmel SAML21
The Cortex-M0+ based SAM L family that was announced before Electronica in November last year is now sampling, with general availability in September. The device now has the best score on the Ultra Low Power Benchmark of EEMBC although it has not been certified by EEMBC.
20 devices were unveiled, from the low end 32/4kB to 256/32 kB of Flash/RAM. The SAML21E, G and J families differentiate themselves primarily through the number of ADC and DACs, touch channels as well as the number of timers, TWI and UART. However, all sport a USB 2.0 Host/Device.
There were new parts with revision number B (e.g. ATSAM4S8CB-AU vs. ATSAM4S8CA-AU). This is what Atmel calls MRL – Marketing Revision Level.
On the price front, Atmel is now publishing prices on its web site. Don’t get excited too fast, the subdomain is actually owned by Digikey, and the prices seem to be the same as on the Digikey website. Prices were on the defensive side for the SAM4S with -5 to -15% declines.
FSL released 12 new part numbers, but much to the same tune as Atmel with its MRL, the new parts are merely silicon revisions. All changes happened in the MK22 family.
Nothing happened for FSL prices this month.
NXP was very quiet today on the product front following the acquisition of Freescale.
Pricewise, there was no change.
No product change was seen this month.
Renesas experienced very limited price changes.
No product change this month at SiLabs.
A few price decreases on the SiM while the EFM32 moved into positive territory.
Limited changes – 20 – at ST this month: 3/4 were for TR suffixes and higher temperature versions of existing parts (7 suffix), but ST released 4 new parts from their recently announced STM32F469/479.,
The new families focus on high-performance graphics for “smartphone-like”. It embeds ST’s Chrom-ART Accelerator, the MIPI-DSI display interface, a crypto processor.
The SF469/479 families are sampling now with volume in Q3, pricing starts at $8.29/10ku for the STM32F469AEH6 (512kB Flash/ BGA169).
ST price changes focused on the STM32F051 and 405VGT6TR (-5% and -17%) while a few F407 and F217 parts enjoyed a 10%+ increase.
Great news from TI, in the form of the MSP432. The family sports a Cortex-M4F at up to 48MHz with up to 256kB of Flash. There is only one experimental device the XMS432P401RIPZR. Although you can find some overlap with the Tiva family that also embeds a Cortex-M4, the Tiva runs at a minimum of 80MHz. We might be looking at similar designs with a low power, low frequency process for the MSP432.
For the 2nd month in a row, we see large price decreases for MSP430 on F525 parts, -10% to -27% while some 430G2 parts rose 10%+.
| Sign up for our newsletter |