COVER STORY
Arm Cortex MCUs designed for IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Edge
Choosing the right processor is at the heart of successful design for the IoT – and making the right choice has never been harder. On the one hand, the growth in this market has led to manufacturers everywhere marketing their devices as being suitable for this application – leading to an overwhelming number of options to choose from. At the same time, design demands are continuously increasing. New IoT systems are expected to be more sophisticated in their response, leading to a requirement for higher performance within a smaller size envelope and usually more constrained costs too. Power consumption and performance are going to be key requirements on every IoT’s designers list of selection requirements for their processor of choice. On chip memory, security and peripherals will be crucial too. IoT systems will require some form of communication too – and often this is integrated into the processor itself. Finally, a growing number of applications utilise AI to intelligently process and act on sensor data. Increasingly, this AI inferencing is carried out at the edge, on the processor itself, to eliminate the time and energy involved in communicating and processing on a cloud-based server.
A
great place to start is by looking at the range of a market leader, a company with a long history of producing microcontrollers for the industrial market with an extensive range to offer. This means that the designer can look at and try devices with different levels of performance and features in the same design environment with the same development and application software, before making their final decision. Better still, having learned one design environment, the designer can select a different device from the same family for their next design, obtaining the perfect fit in terms of features and performance for their new project without climbing the learning curve of working with a new architecture.
ADI – a market leader
Analog Devices completed the acquisition of Maxim Integrated in August 2021 and now all Maxim’s MCUs as well as their other products, solutions and tools have been
Figure 1 – Snapshot of Analog Devices Arm Cortex M4F MCU range
fully integrated into the Analog Devices portfolio. Maxim Integrated have been producing microcontroller (MCU) devices for more than 20 years. Since 2012, they have designed MCUs using Arm Cortex M cores and have shipped over 1 billion units into a broad range of applications. In this month’s edition, Pierre Morris, Field Applications Engineer at Anglia, discusses some of the key MCU products from Analog Devices suitable for IoT, AI and Edge applications. He starts by providing an overview of the whole family, before introducing the capabilities of three devices: Analog Devices MAX32670 (Ultra Low Power MCU), MAX32655 (BLE variant) and the MAX78000 (Ultra Low Power AI MCU).
Analog Devices Arm Cortex MCU overview Analog Devices Arm Cortex M MCUs boast large amounts of FLASH up to 3MB and 1024kB RAM on small footprints. All MCUs within the MAX326xx series incorporate the Arm Cortex M4 core with Floating Point Unit (FPU). The MCUs also
include a wide range of common communication interfaces such as CAN-FD, I2C, I2S, QSPI, SDHC, SPI, UART, USB with a few variants featuring a 1-wire Master.
Security is well catered for across the family. Analog Devices Arm Core MCUs are equipped with encryption engines that support hashing, symmetric and asymmetric encryption. SHA-256, AES-256, ECDSA-256 and RSA-4096 are just some of the encryption standards supported. Secure Boot, Secure Bootloader and True Random Number Generation (TRNG) are included with all devices. Error Correcting Code (ECC) is also implemented providing robust operation protecting against system failures, memory corruption and unpredictable device output. See Figure 1 for an overview of the Arm Cortex M4F MCU range.
Ultra Low Power MCUs
Power management is simplified with embedded SIMO (Single Inductor Multiple Output) regulators on some variants including the MAX32680, this device has ultralow
10 May 2023
Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
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