ARM Community: The Year of the ARM Cortex-M4 MCU: A Wrap-up of ESC Boston - ARM Community

Last week at ESC Boston was a fun packed week for ARM Partners, and the first mention must go to Cypress Gen4 TrueTouch touch screen controllers. These look to be extremely impressive in terms of accuracy, response time, low power and noise reduction capability. And they are of course ARM Cortex-M processor-based. Check out the introductory video below and the product web page.



But what ESC Boston hammered home is that this is the year of the ARM Cortex-M4 MCU. As soon as you walked on the show floor you could see new device families being debuted by STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, alongside those available from Freescale and NXP. Each vendor has their own unique benefits, but what they have in common is a Cortex-M4 processor combining single-cycle DSP performance with the easy-to-use, deterministic control capabilities of the Cortex-M processor architecture.

STMicroelectronics showcased the STM32 F4 series, Cortex-M4 processor-based microcontrollers boasting a blistering 168MHz maximum operating frequency.

Texas Instruments announced their Stellaris LM4F series, which features single-precision floating point Cortex-M4 processor as standard and is the first manufactured on advanced 65nm process technology.

The news was not all about the Cortex-M4 of course. Its compatible little brother, the Cortex-M0 processor, also received attention in the form of NXP's new LCD display driver enabled LPC11D and LPC12D MCU families, taking cost sensitive 8/16-bit tasks head on.

Other newsworthy items around the show include:

• 100 new EFM32 Leopard & Giant Cortex-M3 processor-based microcontrollers from Energy Micro [VIDEO]
• Fujitsu Semiconductor has added 64 devices to its FM3 family of ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based microcontrollers
• NXP is offering emWin Graphic Library free with ARM microcontrollers
• Code Red Technologies have released Red Suite 4.1 which introduces support for STMicroelectronics STM32 MCU families
• Texas Instruments recently announced more details of the ARM Cortex-R4 processor-based Hercules family [VIDEO]

Next we will be at ARM TechCon 2011 – if you haven’t registered yet there is still time – the conference schedule is now available.



If you want an idea of what will be available check out the videos from last year on the ARMFlix ARMTechCon2010 playlist.

Andy Frame, CPU Product Manager, ARM, is based in Cambridge and is fanatical about the success of the Cortex-M3 and how it is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for 32-bit MCU’s. Since joining ARM in 1995, Andy has had a variety of roles from Software Tools Technical Training though to Business Development, joining the CPU product management team about two years ago to look after Cortex-M3.