Luminary Micro Announces Availability of Thirteen New Microcontrollers
Luminary Micro Inc. announced the availability of 13 new Stellaris™ family 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) and their associated development kits. All 13 devices are available immediately and offer up to 64K bytes of single cycle flash, 8K bytes of single cycle SRAM, speeds up to 50 MHz, and up to 8 analog-to-digital converter (ADC) channels at up to 1M samples per second sample rate. Two of the new devices also offer Quadrature Encoder Input (QEI) capabilities in the motion control unit. Stellaris MCUs are available in industrial temperature grade, with pricing ranging from $1.00 to $5.47 in 10K resale quantities, and Stellaris family development kits for the family are available for $249.
Luminary Micro is ARM's lead partner for the Cortex-M3 processor with six previously announced Stellaris MCUs, including the entry-level LM3S101 MCU priced at $1.00. Luminary Micro's Stellaris family of microcontrollers are the only Cortex-M3 implementations available in silicon form. The rich feature set of each Stellaris device is well-suited for applications such as building and home automation; factory automation and control; industrial control power devices; stepper motors; brushed and brushless dc motors; and ac induction motors. The devices also feature single cycle embedded Flash and SRAM, a low-dropout voltage regulator, integrated brown-out reset and power-on reset functions, analog comparators, up to eight channels of 10-bit ADC at up to 1M samples per second, SSI, GPIOs, a watchdog timer and up to seven general purpose timers, up to two UARTs, I2C, and up to six PWM waveform generators for motion control, and QEI, all available directly at the pins without multiplexing.
The company's feature-rich development kit, which was announced in March with the first two Stellaris products, supports the entire Stellaris line. The development kit is a modular design with a unique daughterboard for each family member and a common motherboard. The kit comes ready-to-go with bundled software and tools designed to get users running in 10 minutes or less. In addition to the development hardware, the bundle includes Luminary Micro's comprehensive peripheral driver library with easy to use high-level APIs; comprehensive documentation, schematics, and example programs as well as all cables and jumpers. Users of more than one Stellaris family member can simply change out the daughterboard to accommodate new products � additional daughterboard kits are available individually. The development kit carries the CE seal of compliance to the mandatory European requirements and is fully certified.
The development kit also includes evaluation versions of popular software and hardware development tools. The software tools packages included are ARM's RealView® Microcontroller Development Kit, which incorporates the industry-proven Keil™ µVision development environment; CodeSourcery's Sourcery G++ GNU tools including the Eclipse debugger; and IAR Systems' Embedded Workbench development environment. The development kit also includes FreeRTOS.org™, Pumpkin's Salvo™ Lite, Micrium's uC/OS-II, and Express Logic's ThreadX® real-time operating systems. All of the real time operating systems are optimized for small-footprint applications, and all of the ports include extensive programming examples.
