Luminary Micro shows Stellaris DK-LM3S9B96 kit

A Luminary Micro product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 2, 2009

Luminary Micro, creator of the Stellaris family of ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers (MCUs), unveiled the Stellaris DK-LM3S9B96 development kit at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.

The kit - released in support of the 10 Stellaris family members launched earlier in March - provides users with access to all the features of the Stellaris microcontrollers, including combinations of connectivity, data efficiency and advanced motion control.

In addition to enabling access to the features of the latest Stellaris microcontroller family members - including simultaneous interfaces for Ethernet MAC/PHY, USB on-the-go and controller area network - the DK-LM3S9B96 adds several features, according to the company.

These include: an integrated 3.5in (8.9cm) colour QVGA LCD graphics display with a resistive touch interface; a thumbwheel potentiometer for menu navigation; a MicroSD card slot; 1Mb of serial Flash memory; precision 3V analogue reference voltage; a user light-emitting diode (LED) and pushbutton; and input/output (I/O) wired to break-out pads.

The DK-LM3S9B96 takes advantage of the Stellaris family's external peripheral interface (with an 8Mb SDRAM memory module attachment) and the integrated interchip sound (I2S) interface (with an external audio codec and interface supporting line in/out, microphone in and headphone out).

Additionally, it features the fully integrated Stellaris LM3S9B96 MCU.

The LM3S9B96 microcontroller is based on the low-power revision of the ARM Cortex-M3 controller core operating at up to 80MHz, with 256Kb flash, 96Kb SRAM, a 32-channel DMA, a 32-bit external peripheral interface, a 16MHz internal 1 per cent precision oscillator and on-chip ROM preloaded with the royalty-free Stellarisware peripheral driver library, boot loader, AES encryption lookup tables, a cyclical redundancy check (CRC) function and the SafeRTOS kernel for general RTOS and safety-critical applications.

The LM3S9B96 also features real-time industrial connectivity, with a 10/100 Ethernet MAC/PHY, two CAN controllers, USB 2.0 full-speed OTG/Host/Device, two SSI/SPI controllers, two I2C interfaces, an I2S interface and three UARTs, as well as hardware-assisted support for synchronised industrial networks utilising the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

The LM3S9B96 microcontroller also features advanced motion-control features, including eight motion-control PWM outputs with dead-band timers, two quadrature encoder inputs for precise position monitoring and four fault-protection inputs for low-latency shutdown.

The microcontroller also features an analogue capability, including three analogue comparators and 16 channels of 10-bit analogue-to-digital conversion with the ability to sample two channels simultaneously.

The LM3S9B96 provides 16 digital comparators, a 24-bit Systick timer, four 32-bit or eight 16-bit general-purpose timers, two watchdog timers with different clock sources, a low-dropout voltage regulator so that only one supply voltage is required, brownout reset, a power-on reset controller and up to 65 GPIOs.

The kit spans the design spectrum from evaluation to prototyping to application-specific design by functioning both as a development platform and as a serial in-circuit debug interface for any Stellaris microcontroller-based target board.

The kit Software includes tool suite choices such as the evaluation versions of the ARM Realview microcontroller development kit (MDK), the IAR Embedded Workbench Kickstart Edition, the Code Red Technologies Red Suite and the Codesourcery Sourcery G++ GNU tools.