Adding to its portfolio of SafeTI design components, Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced its latest 32-bit dual-core lockstep Hercules RM57Lx and TMS570LCx microcontrollers (MCUs) for developers’ functional safety applications. These two new floating-point devices offer a 50% increase in computational performance over any of TI’s current ARM Cortex-R MCUs, allowing system designers to use a single Hercules MCU to replace several discrete MCUs or an FPGA-MCU combination.
These new MCUs also provide the largest available on-chip flash and RAM in the Hercules platform, along with several safety feature enhancements. System and software developers will enjoy an insightful, efficient and powerful debug experience for code profiling and greater execution visibility, enabled by integrated real-time instruction and data trace support.
Easing development reuse and product scalability, the new lockstep and cached MCUs are software- and pin-compatible with TI’s existing Hercules MCU portfolio. The new RM57Lx MCUs help developers more easily and quickly meet IEC 61508 functional safety standards for a variety of applications, including railway signalling, aviation anti-skid, programmable logic controllers, motors and drives and medical equipment.
The new TMS570LCx MCUs will likewise help designers more easily and quickly meet the ISO 26262 functional safety standard for transportation applications such as advanced driver assistance systems, domain control, electric propulsion systems, off-road vehicles.
