Microcontrollers Serve Industrial Internet of Things
November 24, 2013. Spansion Inc. has announced a complete family of microcontrollers addressing high-performance and low-power needs for industrial applications such as factory automation, building management, inverter drives, smart meters, home appliances, and medical devices. This family includes the release of the first line of its low-power Spansion FM0+ products, which are now sampling. The Spansion FM3 Family and the first products of the high-performance Spansion FM4 Family are in mass production.
The Spansion FM (flexible microcontrollers) family, based on ARM Cortex-M processors, offers a seamless transition for customers for high-performance and low-power needs. The family delivers high performance up to 200 MHz/250 MIPS for applications such as factory automation, building management, and motor control, as well as ultra low power features for sensors, human machine interfaces, and home appliances. These products are offered with different voltage ranges from 1.65 V to 5.5 V, embedded flash memory options ranging from 64 KB to 2 MB, analog interfaces, and support for serial, CAN, USB, and Ethernet communications interfaces.
Spansion's industrial solutions meet a diverse range of needs including the transition to the growing industrial Internet of Things (IoT), which requires high-performance MCUs, graphical user interfaces, connectivity, and programmability.
“Spansion delivers a scalable family of microcontrollers designed for the industrial market with options from low power to industry-leading performance that allows for differentiated features such as touch, connectivity and inverter drives to be added into a single MCU,” said Saied Tehrani, senior vice president and CTO of Spansion. “Together with Spansion's extensive software support and long history serving global industrial markets in both flash memory and MCUs, the Spansion FM family and solutions help our customers simplify system design and accelerate time to market.”
High Performance Spansion FM4 Family
With more than 140 products in production now, the Cortex-M4-based Spansion FM4 Family incorporates DSP and FPU functions that provide the power required for advanced computations and ease a model-based design approach. The products include a rich set of peripherals, including inverter drive support, SDIO, USB, CAN, and Ethernet as well as embedded flash ranging from 256 KB to 2 MB that support 100,000 rewrite cycles with a 20-year data retention.
Universal Spansion FM3 Family
With more than 570 products in production now, the Cortex-M3 standard-core-based Spansion FM3 Family ranges from 32-pin to 176-pin versions. It comes with a rich set of peripherals, including inverter drive support, USB, CAN, and Ethernet, and it offers 64 KB to 1.5MB of embedded flash memory.
Entry/Low Power Spansion FM0+ Family
The Spansion FM0+ Family is based on the ARM Cortex-M0+ core, optimized for low power and high efficiency. It opeates at 70 µA/MHz. This family is designed for a range of industrial applications that require low-power consumption at cost-effective prices. The products are now sampling.
Download the Spansion FM Family Fact Sheet.