TI Announces New Low-Power, Floating-Point Stellaris ARM Cortex-M4F Microcontrollers


September 26, 2011 -- Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) today announced the new low-power, floating-point Stellaris Cortex-M4F microcontroller generation. All of the new LM4Fx Stellaris microcontrollers provide floating point for performance headroom and best-in-class power consumption to address portability and power budgets. Developers can also select from a variety of high-performance analog, memory and connectivity options to best satisfy design parameters across a broad range of applications, such as industrial automation, motion control, health and fitness and more.

The new Stellaris MCUs are the first Cortex-M-based microcontrollers to be built on 65-nm technology, paving the roadmap to higher speeds, larger memory and even lower power.

To ease design and speed time-to-market, TI's free license and royalty-free StellarisWare software is available for download. StellarisWare software includes hundreds of example projects, application and peripheral libraries and open source stacks. To conserve flash memory, TI also offers the software pre-loaded in ROM. Supported by five popular IDEs, Stellaris microcontroller kits jump-start design in 10 minutes or less. Developers can easily scale designs and reuse code across the entire code compatible Stellaris Cortex-M microcontroller platform.

Features of the Stellaris Cortex-M4F MCU platform

  • ARM Cortex-M4F floating-point core operating at up to 80MHz to provide targeted performance headroom for application differentiation.
  • Two high-performance 12-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and three comparators support mixed-signal applications. 12-bit ADC accuracy is achievable at the full 1-MSPS rating without any hardware averaging, eliminating any performance trade-offs.
  • Standby currents now as low as 1.6ľA enable longer battery life and support constrained power budgets.
  • Connectivity options including USB (host, device and On-The-Go), UARTs, I2C, SSI/SPI and CAN to support communications.
  • Integrated EEPROM supports high-endurance non-volatile storage of user interface or configuration parameters to reduce system cost.
  • Options for up to 256kBytes of flash and 32kBytes of SRAM.
  • Code compatibility with more than 220 Stellaris Cortex-M microcontrollers.

Availability and Pricing

The new Stellaris Cortex-M4F microcontrollers start at $1.53 at 10K quantities. The EK-LM4F232 evaluation kit is priced at $149, and can immediately be ordered from the TI website with an expected lead time of up to two weeks.


Reprinted from SOCcentral.com, your first stop for ASIC, FPGA, EDA, and IP news and design information.
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