The new mcu supports edge artificial intelligence and industry-leading real-time control

     Texas Instruments has released two new families of real-time MCUS, showcased at electronica 2024, that offer advancements to help engineers enable smarter and safer processing in automotive and industrial applications. Its TMS320F28P55x series C2000 MCUS are the industry's first real-time microcontroller portfolio with integrated NPU for high-precision and low-latency fault detection. The F29H85x series is based on the company's new 64-bit C29 digital signal processor core and offers an advanced architecture with integrated safety and security features.

     "Engineers are increasingly working to design more energy-efficient, fast-decision making automotive and industrial applications, driving the need for more scalable processing power, extended memory and on-chip security," said Amichai Ron, TI's senior vice president of embedded processing. "For decades, our C2000 MCUS have enabled manufacturers to measure and efficiently process real data. The introduction of enhanced real-time performance and edge AI in our C2000 portfolio today will enable engineers to solve more complex problems and reach higher levels of system efficiency, safety and sustainability."

     The challenge for today's engineers is to design systems that can make accurate, intelligent decisions in real time to perform functions such as arc fault detection in solar and energy storage systems and motor bearing fault detection for predictive maintenance. As the industry's first real-time mcu to integrate a neural processing unit, its new C2000 TMS320F28P55x family addresses these challenges by ensuring consistent performance for real-time processing.

     The NPU in the TMS320F28P55x family offloads the execution of the neural network model from the main CPU, achieving latency 5 to 10 times lower than software implementation to facilitate faster, more accurate decision making. In addition, the model running on the integrated NPU is trained to learn and adapt to different environments, helping the system achieve more than 99 percent fault detection accuracy, resulting in more informed decisions at the edge. The company's complete AI toolchain, including models optimized and tested for specific applications, helps engineers of any experience level easily complete the AI model development process.

     Designers are increasingly looking for single MCUS with more flash memory, more computing power, and more integrated features. This need is especially evident as cars move from discrete solutions to integrated solutions, where a single chip can handle various computing and management functions in the powertrain. The new C29 core uses a 64-bit architecture, and the real-time signal chain performance is more than twice that of the C28 core.

     The F29H85x series features a comprehensive diagnostic and error checking mechanism that complies with ISO 26262 and International Electrotechnical Commission 61508 automotive and industrial safety standards up to ASIL D and SIL 3. These MCUS also offer network security features with fully isolated hardware security modules that protect systems from unauthorized access and cyber threats. In addition, the company's proprietary safety and assurance unit provides runtime safety and security without compromising performance, with advanced context-aware memory protection units that provide hardware isolation of CPU tasks from interference and self-test processes.