Real-time capable, cost-sensitive power control with XMC1400 microcontrollers; XMC1000 family extended by performance and connectivity

The XMC1400 microcontrollers will open up new applications for Infineon Technologies AG (FSE: IFX / OTCQX: IFNNY) in industrial automation, digital power conversion, and electronic control. In comparison with the earlier XMC1000 products, the new XMC1400 series offers greater control performance and additional connectivity. The XMC1400 uses the ARM® Cortex®-M0 processor and provides comprehensive peripheral functionality tailored carefully to their target applications. These include actuators in industrial automation, digital power conversion for the control of LED lamps and multiphase electric motors, and the electronic control of small combustion engines such as those in lawnmowers, chainsaws, or generators.

XMC1400 products offer more connectivity than the earlier XMC1000 microcontrollers, as well as more processing power and therefore more accuracy of control. They have a 48MHz clock cycle. The XMC1000 series runs at 32MHz. In the XMC1400, significant elements of the controller peripherals such as PWM timers and AD converters can also be operated at double frequency – that is, at 96MHz. Unique among Cortex M0-based products, the XMC1400 is also capable of carrying out trigonometric calculations and division in real-time. An integrated MATH co-processor working in parallel with the Cortex-M0 CPU is responsible for the additional real-time operations.

The powerful microcontrollers of the XMC1400 series have four CCU timer modules (two CCU4 and two CCU8 modules) and therefore up to 16 independent timers, for example for PWM generation in real-time. That allows them to meet the special requirements for electronic regulation and control of ignition, throttle, and injection pumps in the price-sensitive future market of small combustion engines. For the control of electric motors, the XMC1400 offers two interfaces for the connection of Hall sensors or optical encoders.

The XMC1400 also has a BCCU peripheral unit (Brightness and Color Control Unit) for flicker-free digital dimming and color control of LEDs. That allows the design of multi-channel LED switched-mode power supplies that can regulate colored LEDs to simulate the spectrum of sunlight (tunable white). The XMC1400 has up to four comparators for the regulation of switching power supplies. The earlier XMC1000 microcontrollers have at most three.

More connectivity for automation technology as a basis for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 requires decentralized, networked intelligence. In any application requiring the networking of numerous sensors and actuators, the XMC1400 provides not only the real-time control performance required, but also the necessary interfaces. The XMC1400 also ensures reasonable system costs for solutions that are not too complex. All XMC1400 models offer standard communications interfaces like UART, I ²C, SPI, and I ²S. The XMC1403 and XMC1404 microcontrollers also have the ability to connect participants of two CAN buses. CAN (Controller Area Network) is one of the most commonly used bus standards in automation technology.

Just as for the XMC1000 microcontrollers, Infineon also offers customer-specific versions of the XMC1400 in which secure bootloaders and an appropriate toolchain can load firmware securely into the Flash memory in encrypted form.

Availability of the XMC1400

Samples in all package variants are available for the products in the XMC1400 series, as well as small evaluation boards, or bootkits. Production has already started for the XMC1400 in the LQFP-64 package. For the rest, production ramp-up is planned for the start of the second quarter of 2016. The XMC1400 product variants differ in parameters such as memory size (32 to 200 KB of Flash), PWM timers (8 or 16), and CAN nodes (2 or none). The package variants include VQFN-40 (this is pin-compatible with the XMC1300), VQFN-48, VQFN-64, and LQFP-64. The XMC1400 series is supported by the free DAVE™ development environment.

Further information

You can find more information about the XMC1400, their development platform DAVE, and development kits at www.infineon.com/xmc, www.infineon.com/dave, and www.infineon.com/xmc-dev. Infineon will show off its new XMC products in Hall 5, Booth 360 at the “Embedded World” trade show (February 23-25 in Nuremberg, Germany). More on that at www.infineon.com/embeddedworld.