Freescale: ‘MCUs enrich human machine interface applications’

According to the embedded semiconductor specialist, the Kinetis K70 family targets applications that require a sophisticated graphics lcd user interface as well as advanced connectivity and security functionality. This, adds Freescale, is enabled without the increased cost and power consumption associated with multichip designs. The K70 is supported by Freescale's portable embedded graphic user interface (PEG) graphics development suite – a visual layout and design tool designed to enable the creation of GUIs within a pc environment. According to Freescale, the Kinetis K70 range is suitable for graphics lcd displays and comes with an integrated graphics lcd controller, 1MB of Flash memory and 128KB of sram. This enables it to drive lcd panels at 8bit QVGA resolution without the need to add external program and frame buffer memory. Displays of up to 24bit SVGA resolution can also be supported with external memory. The range incorporates a 120/150MHz ARM Cortex-M4 core, hardware floating point unit and crossbar architecture. "The K70 is our most feature-rich Kinetis family to date, bringing a new level of performance, memory and integration to a portfolio already full of design options," said Geoff Lees, vice president of Freescale's Industrial and Multi-Market MCU business. "Graphics lcd capability was the logical next step in the evolution of the Kinetis feature set. It allows developers to add attractive, multi function user interfaces to their designs quickly and with minimal cost." The PEG development suite is designed to allow the quick creation of high colour depth, multilayer GUIs that work with an application's rtos. Existing PEG applications can be moved from a different architecture to the K70 range. The PEG design tool, WindowBuilder provides a drag and drop interface that enables the layout of GUI screens and controls in a pc environment as they would appear on the end product display. The resulting C++ source code is then automatically generated and ready to be compiled and linked into the end application. A eGUI graphics driver is also provided for use with smaller resource Kinetis mcus and smart lcd displays. The object style driver includes touch screen support and font and bitmap converter utilities. It requires a small memory footprint and is designed to function standalone or with Freescale's MQX rtos. The mcus are supported by Freescale's CodeWarrior 10.x integrated development environment with Processor Expert auto code generator and the ARM ecosystem that includes tools from IAR, Keil, Atollic and Segger. The 120/150MHz mcus add several new features to the existing K10, K20 and K60 families, while retaining pin and software compatibility. Faster cpu performance is available, up to 150MHz cpu speed and increased cache capabilities designed to improve computing throughout. According to Freescale, it provides one of the highest Coremark results to date on a Cortex-M microcontroller. The floating point unit extends the range of data acquisition intensive applications like motor drive, audio processing and digital filtering by reducing computation time and increasing system accuracy. Dedicated motor control peripherals include multiple timers and 16bit a/d converters with fault control and programmable delay block support for driving stepper, BLDC and PMAC motors with sensor or sensorless algorithms. The high speed USB host/device On-The-Go supports 480Mb/s data transfer using an external ULPI transceiver, while dram and nand Flash controllers enable the connection DDR, DDR2 and low power DDR memories as well as up to 32bit ECC current/future nand memories. Engineering samples of the Kinetis K70 120MHz mcu are now available with additional family members expected in early 2012 and full production planned for May. The Tower System TWR-K70F120M module is now available to order and the TWR-K60F120M and TWR-LCD-RGB modules are expected to be available in Q1 2012.