For industrial equipment requiring Ethernet and CAN control, the M4N group of Arm Cortex-M4 microcontrollers are manufactured on a 40nm process by Toshiba Electronics Europe.
They enhance the TXZ+ family and include an Arm Cortex-M4 core with floating point unit (FPU), running at speeds up to 200MHz. There is also an integrated 2Mbyte code flash and 32kbyte data flash memory with 100k write cycle endurance. The microcontrollers also offer a range of interfacing and communication options such as Ethernet, CAN and USB 2.0 FS OTG with integrated PHY.
The M4N group microcontrollers are suited to office equipment, building and factory automation applications, as well as being used in industrial networking and information management devices which are used in IoT-based home appliances, such as home security and smart meters.
They have enhanced communication functions integrated including a serial memory interface that also supports quad/octal SPI, audio interface (I2S) and external bus interface. There are also UART, FUART, TSPI and I2C interfaces supported by a built-in three-unit direct memory access controller (DMAC). The devices can allocate independent DMA and RAM for each peripheral circuit. A bus matrix circuit configuration allows the bus master to efficiently transfer data. This allows the M4N group devices to enable an Ethernet controller, CAN, and USB controller to be processed independently in parallel at the same time.
The devices support a variety of sensing applications with a high-speed, precision 12-bit analogue to digital converter (ADC) that allows individual sample and hold times to be set for each of the 24 ADC input channels. A dual-channel 8-bit digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) and a range of motor control functions are also included.
Self-diagnosis functions for ROM, RAM, ADC and clock help customers to achieve IEC60730 Class B functional safety certification, advises Toshiba.
Full documentation, sample software (with actual usage examples), and driver software for each peripheral are available for download on Toshiba’s website. Evaluations boards and development environments are also provided in cooperation with Arm ecosystem partners.
The M4N devices are available in a selection of fine-pitch LQFP and VFBGA packages.
