Actel SmartFusion

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SmartFusion is a family of microcontrollers with an integrated FPGA of Actel. The device includes an ARM Cortex-M3 hard processor core (with up to 512kB of flash and 64kB of RAM) and analog peripherals such as a multi-channel ADC and DACs in addition to their flash-based FPGA fabric. [1]

Actel Corporation was an American manufacturer of nonvolatile, low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions. It was headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices worldwide.

ARM, previously Advanced RISC Machine, originally Acorn RISC Machine, is a family of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. Arm Holdings develops the architecture and licenses it to other companies, who design their own products that implement one of those architectures‍—‌including systems-on-chips (SoC) and systems-on-modules (SoM) that incorporate memory, interfaces, radios, etc. It also designs cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products.

ARM Cortex-M series of processor core models

The ARM Cortex-M is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. They are intended for microcontroller use, and have been shipped in tens of billions of devices. The cores consist of the Cortex-M0, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M35P. The Cortex-M4 / M7 / M33 / M35P cores have an FPU silicon option, and when included in the silicon these cores are known as "Cortex-Mx with FPU" or "Cortex-MxF", where 'x' is the core number.

Contents

Models

Model numberFPGA FabricMicrocontroller Subsystem (MSS)
System GatesTiles (D-Flip-Flops)RAM Blocks (4,608 bits)FlashSRAM
A2F06060,0001,5368128 Kb16 Kb
A2F200200,0004,6088256 Kb64 Kb
A2F500500,00011,52024512 Kb64 Kb

Development Hardware

Actel also sells two development boards that include an SmartFusion chip. One is the SmartFusion Evaluation Kit which is a low cost board with an SmartFusion A2F200 and sold for $99. [2] Another is the SmartFusion Development Kit which is a fully featured board with an SmartFusion A2F500 and is sold for $999 . [3]

Development tools

Documentation

The amount of documentation for all ARM chips is daunting, especially for newcomers. The documentation for microcontrollers from past decades would easily be inclusive in a single document, but as chips have evolved so has the documentation grown. The total documentation is especially hard to grasp for all ARM chips since it consists of documents from the IC manufacturer (Actel) and documents from CPU core vendor (ARM Holdings).

A typical top-down documentation tree is: manufacturer website, manufacturer marketing slides, manufacturer datasheet for the exact physical chip, manufacturer detailed reference manual that describes common peripherals and aspects of a physical chip family, ARM core generic user guide, ARM core technical reference manual, ARM architecture reference manual that describes the instruction set(s).

SmartFusion documentation tree (top to bottom)
  1. SmartFusion website.
  2. SmartFusion marketing slides.
  3. SmartFusion datasheets.
  4. SmartFusion reference manuals.
  5. ARM core website.
  6. ARM core generic user guide.
  7. ARM core technical reference manual.
  8. ARM architecture reference manual.

Actel has additional documents, such as: evaluation board user manuals, application notes, getting started guides, software library documents, errata, and more. See External Links section for links to official STM32 and ARM documents.

See also

Microcontroller small computer on a single integrated circuit

A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. In modern terminology, it is similar to, but less sophisticated than, a system on a chip (SoC); an SoC may include a microcontroller as one of its components. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of ferroelectric RAM, NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a small amount of RAM. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded applications, in contrast to the microprocessors used in personal computers or other general purpose applications consisting of various discrete chips.

Embedded system computer system with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system

An embedded system is a controller with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system, often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. Embedded systems control many devices in common use today. Ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors manufactured are used in embedded systems.

Single-board microcontroller

A single-board microcontroller is a microcontroller built onto a single printed circuit board. This board provides all of the circuitry necessary for a useful control task: a microprocessor, I/O circuits, a clock generator, RAM, stored program memory and any necessary support ICs. The intention is that the board is immediately useful to an application developer, without requiring them to spend time and effort to develop controller hardware.

Related Research Articles

Motorola 68HC11 8-bit microcontroller

The 68HC11 is an 8-bit microcontroller (µC) family introduced by Motorola in 1984. Now produced by NXP Semiconductors, it descended from the Motorola 6800 microprocessor by way of the 6809. It is a CISC microcontroller. The 68HC11 devices are more powerful and more expensive than the 68HC08 microcontrollers, and are used in automotive applications, barcode readers, hotel card key writers, amateur robotics, and various other embedded systems. The MC68HC11A8 was the first microcontroller to include CMOS EEPROM.

JTAG is an industry standard for verifying designs and testing printed circuit boards after manufacture.

ARM7 is a group of older 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings for microcontroller use. The ARM7 core family consists of ARM700, ARM710, ARM7DI, ARM710a, ARM720T, ARM740T, ARM710T, ARM7TDMI, ARM7TDMI-S, ARM7EJ-S. The ARM7TDMI and ARM7TDMI-S were the most popular cores of the family. Since ARM7 cores were released from 1993 to 2001, they are no longer recommended for new IC designs; instead ARM Cortex-M or ARM Cortex-R cores are preferred.

The MicroBlaze is a soft microprocessor core designed for Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). As a soft-core processor, MicroBlaze is implemented entirely in the general-purpose memory and logic fabric of Xilinx FPGAs.

The ARM Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) is an open-standard, on-chip interconnect specification for the connection and management of functional blocks in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. It facilitates development of multi-processor designs with large numbers of controllers and peripherals with a bus architecture. Since its inception, the scope of AMBA has, despite its name, gone far beyond microcontroller devices. Today, AMBA is widely used on a range of ASIC and SoC parts including applications processors used in modern portable mobile devices like smartphones. AMBA is a registered trademark of ARM Ltd.

Atmel ARM-based processors are microcontrollers and microprocessors integrated circuits, by Microchip Technology, that are based on various 32-bit ARM processor cores, with in-house designed peripherals and tool support.

AVR32 32-bit RISC microcontroller architecture

The AVR32 is a 32-bit RISC microcontroller architecture produced by Atmel. The microcontroller architecture was designed by a handful of people educated at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, including lead designer Øyvind Strøm and CPU architect Erik Renno in Atmel's Norwegian design center.

ARM9 is a group of older 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings for microcontroller use. The ARM9 core family consists of ARM9TDMI, ARM940T, ARM9E-S, ARM966E-S, ARM920T, ARM922T, ARM946E-S, ARM9EJ-S, ARM926EJ-S, ARM968E-S, ARM996HS. Since ARM9 cores were released from 1998 to 2006, they are no longer recommended for new IC designs, instead ARM Cortex-A, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R cores are preferred.

Programmable system-on-chip Type of integrated circuit

PSoC is a family of microcontroller integrated circuits by Cypress Semiconductor. These chips include a CPU core and mixed-signal arrays of configurable integrated analog and digital peripherals.

EFM32 Gecko MCUs are a family of energy-friendly, mixed-signal 32-bit microcontroller integrated circuits from Energy Micro based on ARM Cortex-M CPUs, including the Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4.

The ARM Cortex-A is a group of 32-bit and 64-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. The cores are intended for application use. The group consists of 32-bit cores: ARM Cortex-A5, ARM Cortex-A7, ARM Cortex-A8, ARM Cortex-A9, ARM Cortex-A12, ARM Cortex-A15, ARM Cortex-A17 MPCore, and ARM Cortex-A32, and 64-bit cores: ARM Cortex-A35, ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Cortex-A55, ARM Cortex-A57, ARM Cortex-A72, ARM Cortex-A73, ARM Cortex-A75, ARM Cortex-A76 and ARM Cortex-A77.

STM32 ARM Cortex-M based Microcontrollers by STMicroelectronics

STM32 is a family of 32-bit microcontroller integrated circuits by STMicroelectronics. The STM32 chips are grouped into related series that are based around the same 32-bit ARM processor core, such as the Cortex-M33F, Cortex-M7F, Cortex-M4F, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M0+, or Cortex-M0. Internally, each microcontroller consists of the processor core, static RAM, flash memory, debugging interface, and various peripherals.

The ARM Cortex-R is a family of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. The cores are optimized for hard real-time and safety-critical applications. Cores in this family implement the ARM Real-time (R) profile, which is one of three architecture profiles, the other two being the Application (A) profile implemented by the Cortex-A family and the Microcontroller (M) profile implemented by the Cortex-M family. The ARM Cortex-R family of microprocessors currently consists of ARM Cortex-R4(F), ARM Cortex-R5(F), ARM Cortex-R7(F), ARM Cortex-R8(F), and ARM Cortex-R52(F).

Allwinner A1X series of system-on-a-chip devices with ARM Cortex-A8 processor cores and Mali 400 GPUs

The Allwinner A1X is a family of single-core SoC devices designed by Allwinner Technology from Zhuhai, China. Currently the family consists of the A10, A13, A10s and A12. The SoCs incorporate the ARM Cortex-A8 as their main processor and the Mali 400 as the GPU.

XMC is a family of microcontroller ICs by Infineon. The XMC microcontrollers use the 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores from ARM Holdings, such as Cortex-M4F and Cortex-M0. XMC stands for "cross-market microcontrollers", meaning that this family can cover due to compatibility and configuration options, a wide range in industrial applications. The family supports three essential trends in the industry: It increases the energy efficiency of the systems, supports a variety of communication standards and reduces software complexity in the development of the application's software environment with the parallel released eclipse-based software tool DAVE.

NXP LPC ARM Cortex-M based Microcontrollers by NXP

LPC is a family of 32-bit microcontroller integrated circuits by NXP Semiconductors. The LPC chips are grouped into related series that are based around the same 32-bit ARM processor core, such as the Cortex-M4F, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M0+, or Cortex-M0. Internally, each microcontroller consists of the processor core, static RAM memory, flash memory, debugging interface, and various peripherals. The earliest LPC series were based on the Intel 8-bit 80C51 core. As of February 2011, NXP had shipped over one billion ARM processor-based chips.

Open-source computing hardware comprises computers and computer components with an open design. They are designed as open-source hardware using open-source principles.

References

  1. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-03-15. Retrieved 2012-03-18.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-03-15. Retrieved 2012-03-18.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-03-30. Retrieved 2012-03-18.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

Further reading

SmartFusion Official Documents
ARM Official Documents
Other
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