Stellaris® 32-bit ARM® Cortex™ MCUs

TI's Standard Architecture MCU Solution for Energy, Connectivity, and Security Markets

 

What is the Stellaris family? | Architecture | Why Choose the ARM Cortex-M Architecture? | Why Choose the Stellaris Family? | Stellaris Tools and Software | Stellaris Part Number Decoders

What is the Stellaris family?

Texas Instruments is the industry leader in bringing 32-bit capabilities and the full benefits of ARM® Cortex™-M microcontrollers to the broadest reach of the microcontroller market. Now with over 220 compatible ARM Cortex-M Stellaris microcontrollers and over 30 Stellaris evaluation, development, and reference design kits, Stellaris fits the performance, integration, power, and price-point requirements of nearly any industrial application. Stellaris with Cortex-M offers a direct path to the strongest ecosystem of development tools, software and knowledge in the industry. Designers who migrate to Stellaris benefit from great tools, small code footprint, and outstanding performance. With StellarisWare software, Stellaris gives developers a huge jump start by providing a free, royalty-free software package that includes a peripheral driver library, graphics library, USB library, code examples, and much more.

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Architecture

The Stellaris family offers a broad range of ARM Cortex-M implementations, including Cortex-M4F and Cortex-M3. Both use the Thumb-2 instruction set, which combines both 16-bit and 32-bit instructions to deliver the best balance of code density and performance. Thumb-2 uses 26% less memory than pure 32-bit code to reduce system cost while delivering 25% better performance. Texas Instruments' award-winning Stellaris family of microcontrollers incorporates the Cortex-M MCU core running up to 80 MHz, embedded flash, SRAM and ROM, a 32-channel DMA, a low drop-out voltage regulator, battery-backed low-power hibernation capability, integrated brown-out reset and power-on reset functions, analog comparators, simultaneous dual ADC capability, GPIOs, watchdog and general-purpose timers (including a second watchdog timer with independent clock), a 16-MHz software-trimmed 1% Precision Oscillator, and a versatile External Peripheral Interface (with modes to support SDRAM, SRAM/Flash, Host-Bus, and M2M). The family also integrates several serial interfaces, including 10/100 Ethernet MAC+PHY, CAN, USB On-The-Go, USB Host/Device, SSI/SPI, UARTs, I2C, and I2S. In addition, several Stellaris MCUs are offered with several StellarisWare software features preprogrammed in memory-saving ROM. Finally, the Stellaris family features peripherals designed specifically for intense industrial motor control, including motion control PWMs and quadrature encoder inputs.

Stellaris® Architecture

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Why Choose the ARM Cortex-M Architecture?

ARM Cortex-M has gained popularity because of both the capabilities of the core, along with unique features to improve performance and help in debug. Texas Instruments’ Stellaris product line gives designers access to the powerful Cortex-M Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC), Embedded Trace Macrocell (ETM), Floating-Point Unit (FPU), and the Memory Protection Unit (MPU). With the ARM Cortex-M core, Stellaris allows for standardization that eliminates future architectural upgrades or software tools changes.

In addition, the ARM ecosystem of third-party tools and solutions providers is the largest in the world. Combined with StellarisWare, no other product offers the breadth of solutions that Stellaris makes available to designers and developers.

Cortex-M is the MCU version of ARM's v7-M instruction set architecture family of cores:

  • Optimized for single-cycle flash usage
  • Deterministic, fast interrupt processing: always 12 cycles, or only six cycles with tail-chaining
  • Three sleep modes with clock gating for low power
  • Single-cycle multiply instruction and hardware divide
  • Atomic operations
  • ARM Thumb2 mixed 16-/32-bit instruction set
  • 1.25 DMIPS/MHz-better than ARM7 and ARM9
  • Extra debug support including data watchpoints and flash patching capabilities beyond ARM7 for the microcontroller market:
    • Requires ½ the flash (code space) of ARM7 applications
    • 2-4 times faster on MCU control applications
    • No assembly code required—ever!

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Why Choose the Stellaris Family?

Designed for serious microcontroller applications, the Stellaris family provides the entry into the industry's strongest ecosystem.

  • Superior integration saves up to $3.28 in system cost
  • Over 220 Stellaris family members to choose from
  • Real MCU GPIOs—all can generate interrupts, are 5-V-tolerant, and have programmable drive strength and slew rate control
  • Advanced communication capabilities, including 10/100 Ethernet MAC/PHY and CAN controllers
  • Sophisticated motion control support in hardware and software
  • Both analog comparators and ADC functionality provide on-chip system options to balance hardware and software performance
  • Ease of development with the StellarisWare software's high-level API interface to the entire Stellaris peripheral set

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Stellaris Tools and Software

Simplify and Speed Development with StellarisWare® Software

StellarisWare software is an extensive suite of software designed to simplify and speed development of Stellaris-based microcontroller applications. All StellarisWare software has a free license and royalty-free use to allow the creation of full-function, easy-to-maintain code. For more information, go to the complete listing of StellarisWare.

For the latest version of StellarisWare software go to the StellarisWare Software Page.

For the latest versions of all of our software including StellarisWare software, application note code samples, utilities, and other downloads, go to the Stellaris Software Updates Page.

IQmath Library for Microcontrollers

Texas Instruments´ IQmath Library is a collection of highly optimized and high precision mathematical functions for C/C++ programmers to seamlessly port the floating-point algorithm into fixed point code. These routines are typically used in computationally intensive real-time applications where optimal execution speed & high accuracy is critical. By using these routines you can achieve execution speeds considerably faster than equivalent code written in standard ANSI C language. The IQmath Library also addresses the limitations of fixed point math by defining a programmable dynamic range and resolution.

IQmath is now available in the full release of Stellaris® ARM® Cortex™-M´s StellarisWare® and controlSUITE™ for C2000™microcontrollers.

Zero to 32 bits in 10 minutes or less—Stellaris Kits

Stellaris Kits accelerate product development by providing all the tools needed to develop and prototype embedded applications right out of the box. All kits include ready-to-run hardware, a complete StellarisWare firmware package, comprehensive documentation, and applicable cables and accessories. Find the right evaluation kit, development kit, reference design kit or module for your application at the Stellaris Kits page.

Stellaris Part Number Decoders

Stellaris Part Guide

M4 Part Number Decoder

  

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