Nuvoton Targets Those Moving Up From 5V Eight-Bit Microcontrollers with the 32-Bit M2003 Series
Designed for projects that have outgrown eight-bit alternatives, the M2003 chips are powered by an Arm Cortex-M23 core.
Nuvoton Technology has announced a new microcontroller family, the M2003 — based around the Arm Cortex-M23 and designed to make it easier to transition from eight-bit alternatives thanks to 5V operating voltage support.
"With continuous advancements in semiconductor technology, the performance of 32-bit microcontrollers has been steadily improving while costs have been decreasing, making them the mainstream choice in the market," the company says in support of its latest launch. "The rapid growth in applications such as AIoT [Artificial Intelligence of Things], industrial automation, smart homes, energy storage, and automotive electronics has placed higher demands on microcontroller performance. Traditional eight-bit microcontrollers often fall short in various applications, driving the widespread adoption of 32-bit microcontrollers."
It's for these use-cases — where an eight-bit microcontroller would traditionally have been used but now fails to keep up with computational demand — Nuvoton has designed the M2003 family, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos. The chips include an Arm Cortex-M23 microcontroller core running at up to 24MHz, a 32-bit hardware multiplier/divider, 4kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 32kB of on-board flash.
Peripherals include four sets of 32-bit timers, a watchdog timer, three-channel enhanced input capture timer, two UART, one I2C, and one Universal Serial Control Interface (USCI) configurable as a hardware UART, SPI, or I2C bus as required, plus an eight-channel 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) and a six-channel 16-bit pulse-width modulation (PWM) controller alongside up to 18 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins.
A key feature comes in the parts' operating voltage range, which is a surprisingly high-reaching 2.4V to 5.5V. That high upper limit, the company explains, comes in order to assist those migrating from older eight-bit microcontrollers that have a 5V operating voltage — contrasting with rival designs, which max out around the 3.3V mark. For quick-start work, meanwhile, the company offers the NuMaker-M2003FC development board — and promises full support in its NuTool CodeGenerator, claimed to "quickly generate initialization projects and integrates peripheral, pin, and clock configuration function" for new projects.
More information on the chips, which are available in TSSOP20 and QFN20 packages, is available on the Nuvoton website; the NuMaker-M2003FC development board is available to order from the company's own web store at $20.