Nuvoton Technology Pays Homage to Arduino's UNO with the NuMicro-Powered NuMaker-UNO-M4
A NuMicro M467SJHAN gives this Arduino UNO-alike a 200MHz Arm Cortex-M4 plus a range of peripherals.
Nuvoton Technology has become the latest to adopt the classic Arduino UNO form factor, announcing the NuMaker-UNO-M4 — a familiar footprint for a development board built around the company's NuMicro M467SJHAN Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller.
"The NuMaker-UNO-M4 development board […] continues the classic [Arduino UNO] design with industrial-grade standards, offering both ease of use and professional performance," the company claims of its creation. "The development board is fully compatible with Arduino [UNO] pinout and additionally integrates essential industrial communication interfaces: Ethernet, RS485, CAN bus, and an SD card interface. It's suitable for diverse application scenarios such as smart transportation, smart healthcare, smart industry, and smart homes."
Arduino's original UNO development board — complete with unusual spacing between segments of its 0.1" female pin headers — was its first to make the move to the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller, where it stayed for some considerable time before the Arduino UNO R4 Minima and WiFi jumped to the Renesas RA4M1. Nuvoton's NuMaker, then, has more in common with these modern UNOs than the original: the NuMicro M467SJHAN chip at its heart is based on the same Arm Cortex-M4 core as Renesas' microcontroller.
The NuMicro M467SJHAN features a single 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 core running at 200MHz, a single-precision hardware floating-point unit (FPU), digital signal processor (DSP), a nested vectored interrupt controller (NVIC), and a memory protection unit, along with 512kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 1MB of flash memory. There are 12-bit analog to digital and digital to analog converters (ADCs and DACs), four comparators, 24-channel 16-bit pulse-width modulation (PWM), four 32-bit timers, cryptographic acceleration, USB 2.0 High Speed and Full Speed On-The-Go (OTG) support, an Ethernet MAC, and peripherals including quad-SPI, I2S, LPUART, I2C, CAN FD, KPI, USCI, PSIO, and ISO7816, plus SDHC support and an external bus interface.
On the NuMaker-UNO-M4, these features are exposed on Arduino UNO-format female pin headers plus additional connectors where necessary — along with a dedicated header to add a microSD card slot for storage expansion. There's a USB Type-C connector that can be used for data and power — supporting programming the microcontroller directly from the Arduino IDE using Nuvoton's core definition and the Nu-Link USB driver — with a separate barrel-jack connector supporting 8–18VDC power supplies. All told, it's a much closer match to the traditional Arduino UNO board design than the company's original NuMaker-UNO — a noticeably larger design with a side-mounted barrel-jack connector.
More information on the NuMaker-UNO-M4 is available on the Nuvoton website; the company has begun selling the board for $33.14, though at the time of writing it was showing as out of stock.