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Freescale Introduces Industry’s First 32-Bit, Dual-Core Automotive Microcontrollers with Flexible Low-Power Modes

DETROIT--Today’s electronics-laden vehicles contain an unprecedented level of intelligence and connectivity. Accelerating this trend with advances in silicon technology, Freescale Semiconductor has introduced a dual-core, 32-bit microcontroller (MCU) family designed to enhance the performance, power efficiency and flexibility of automotive body electronics.

The latest addition to Freescale’s MPC55xx portfolio, the MPC5510 family is the first line of 32-bit automotive MCUs featuring a dual-core architecture with flexible low-power modes. Built on Power Architecture™ technology, the MPC5510 family delivers a range of price/performance options and supports extensive communications capabilities, including the FlexRay™, controller area network (CAN) and local interconnect network (LIN) protocols.

“The MPC5510 family offers the best of both worlds for today’s demanding body electronics applications: exceptional performance and excellent power efficiency,” said Mike McCourt, vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Microcontroller Division. “The MPC5510 family can help reduce the number of modules in the car cockpit area through higher integration of gateway and body electronics functions, such as seat and mirror control, tire pressure monitoring and remote keyless entry.”

Scalable device options for body electronics

The MPC5510 family scales from single-core MCUs (with 384KB of embedded flash, low pin count and reduced feature sets) up to 80MHz dual-core devices (with 1MB of flash and advanced communications peripherals). This scalability enables developers to address a broad range of body electronics applications with a flexible platform architecture that extends to other members of the MPC55xx portfolio. Target applications include body control modules (BCMs), gateways (linking FlexRay to CAN and LIN networks), instrument cluster controllers, center stack display controllers and smart junction boxes.

“Automotive OEMs continually seek ways to reduce the number of electronic control units in vehicles through higher component integration,” said Chris Webber, vice president, Automotive Practice, of Strategy Analytics. “With the growing need for network gateway functionality beyond high-end vehicles, automakers want to integrate this function into the body controller or the center stack display electronics. They also want to build flexible hardware and software platforms that can address evolving application and end customer needs. Freescale’s MPC5510 family appears well positioned to address these design requirements without compromising system performance, cost or power efficiency.”

As automotive architectures evolve toward more complex hierarchical networks, automakers require higher-performance body electronics modules to support gateway functions, as well as higher functional integration and centralized services, such as diagnostic, reprogramming and power management. The MPC5510 family addresses these needs with a dual-core architecture based on two e200 cores.

Supported by a crossbar switch architecture and 16-channel enhanced direct memory access (eDMA), Freescale’s innovative dual-core design makes the MPC5510 family one of the most efficient, low-power 32-bit automotive MCUs in the market. The MPC5510 family also enables customers to migrate to higher levels of integration in central body electronics and connect the body electronics domain to a FlexRay network. Automakers increasingly are adopting the FlexRay protocol as the vehicle “backbone” network and integrating more functionality into the central body controller.

Comprehensive development support

The MPC5510 family leverages the comprehensive suite of hardware and software development tools available for the MPC55xx family and Power Architecture technology. Access to this mature ecosystem reduces application development complexity and debugging/validation time during prototyping and software integration phases.

MPC5510 family features

  • 48MHz to 80MHz e200 core built on Power Architecture technology with 16/32-bit variable length encoding (VLE) capability, designed to help reduce code footprint for improved code density and reduced memory requirements
  • Optional dual-core architecture, with additional VLE-only e200 core
  • 16-channel enhanced direct memory access (eDMA)
  • Up to 1MB of embedded flash memory with Error Correction Coding (ECC) and Read-While-Write (RWW) capability for on-chip data storage.
  • Up to 64KB static RAM (SRAM) with ECC
  • Communication interfaces:
    • Up to 6 FlexCAN modules
    • Optional dual-channel FlexRay protocol controller
    • Up to 6 serial communication interfaces (eSCI) with integrated LIN state machine
    • Up to 3 deserial serial peripheral interfaces (DSPI)
  • Crossbar switch architecture for efficient data flow
  • Support for multiple low-power modes and clock sources.
  • Single 5V supply and 5V analog-to-digital controller (ADC)
  • Available in 144-pin 20 x 20mm LQFP or 208-pin 17 x 17mm MAPBGA

MPC5510 family availability

Freescale plans to offer samples of the MPC5510 family in Q1 2007. A starter kit including an evaluation board and debug interface is planned for April 2007. For more product information, visit http://www.freescale.com/files/pr/mpc5510.html.

Freescale: The leader in automotive semiconductors

Freescale is the No. 1 supplier of automotive semiconductors, with more than 30 years of experience in the automotive industry. Freescale technology is used in an overwhelming majority of new vehicles. Freescale’s sensors, analog products and 8-, 16- and 32-bit microcontroller families provide intelligence and connectivity for advanced safety, body electronics, chassis, engine control, powertrain, driver information and telematics. Freescale is a pioneer in FlexRay™ technology and was the first supplier to integrate CAN, LIN and flash memory technologies on automotive MCUs.

About Freescale Semiconductor

Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. is a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking and wireless markets. Freescale became a publicly traded company in July 2004. The company is based in Austin, Texas, and has design, research and development, manufacturing or sales operations in more than 30 countries. Freescale, a member of the S&P 500®, is one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies with 2005 sales of $5.8 billion (USD).

www.freescale.com. 

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