Texas Instruments Inc.'s two new programmable real-time unit
(PRU) daughter cards and free software allow customers to add differentiated peripherals and design
flexibility for reduced development costs to extend
the functionality of their AM1x
Sitara ARMmicroprocessor-based systems.
The universal
asynchronous receiver/transmitters (UART) PRU and controller area
network lite (CAN-lite) PRU daughter cards can be used in evaluation with the
AM1x Sitara ARM MPUs or as a standalone reference design to jumpstart customers'
product development. The daughter cards snap into the PRU peripheral connection
on the AM1x Sitara ARM MPUs evaluation modules, and once the software is
loaded, customers have additional design flexibility for embedded industrial,
medical and consumer designs.
The
AM1x Sitara ARM MPUs come in a variety of performance and power options and
support multiple industry-specific peripherals and interfaces. The addition of
these daughter cards address the needs of systems requiring:
UARTs: The
UART PRU daughter card and software increases the number of UARTs available
from three on-chip UARTs to 11 (three on-chip and a maximum of eight created
through software) with free production quality code, optimized for complex,
highly connected designs. For example, in a point-of-service or portable data
terminal application, there may be a need for several UARTs. Instead of buying
separate interfaces for each of the extra capabilities (keypad, printer, LED
bank), designers can use the PRU daughter card.
CAN-lite: The CAN-lite PRU daughter card and
software provides soft and hard CAN bus interfaces. CAN interfaces allow
microprocessors and their applications to communicate with each other without a
host computer in high-noise industrial environments. The PRU CAN-lite interface
abides by theBOSCH CAN
Specification 2.0B rules.
With
these PRU daughter cards, TI provides free, optimized software to help reduce
development time and costs. The tested software code help developers focus on
their intellectual property, rather than spending large amounts of time writing
code. Developers can install their application software and begin development
immediately.
PRUs
are common peripherals on all AM1x Sitara ARM MPUs and future devices in the
product line. Future AM1x Sitara ARM MPU devices will also offer PRU daughter
card peripherals and software that will extend to both future versions or the
AM1x product line and future TI ARM Cortex-A8 based products.
The
UART daughter card is $72, and the CAN daughter card is available for $77. Both
are available now from Mistral
Solutions.
The production-quality software code for both daughter cards is free for download from Mistral Solutions.
You can also develop and deploy their designs with several available AM1x Sitara
ARM MPU evaluation kits and modules, which vary by product and the contents of
the kit or module. All three kits include a software development kit for Linux
kernel 2.6.33 board support package.
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