Freescale Semiconductor has introduced its new Kinetis X series, a microcontroller unit built on an ARM Cortex-M core.
The new Kinetis X series features ARM Cortex-M4 core, an increased operating frequency up to 200 MHz, internal memories of 1-4 Mbyte of flash and 0.5 Mbyte of SRAM, and a 64-bit AXI bus.
Featuring the high end of Freescale’s Kinetis 32-bit MCU portfolio, the X series is suitable for designers who need additional horsepower and memory for their applications, but would prefer to retain the cost-effectiveness, ease of use and power consumption of an MCU.
Freescale Industrial and Multi-Market MCU business vice president Geoff Lees said the Kinetis X series provides a level of performance, memory and feature integration not previously seen in this class of MCUs and gives their customers the design flexibility they need to stay at the forefront of their markets.
The new series features 32 KB of tightly coupled SRAM for single-cycle access to scratchpad data and a 64-channel DMA controller that offloads general peripheral and memory servicing tasks from the CPU.
All Kinetis MCUs come with Freescale’s MQX real-time operating system with integrated TCP/IP and USB stacks and support for low/no-cost graphic LCD and encryption plug-ins.
The series also feayures the Eclipse-based CodeWarrior 10.x integrated development environment (IDE) with Processor Expert – providing a visual, automated framework to accelerate the development of complex embedded applications.
