AM243x is an extension of the industrial-grade portfolio from the Sitara technology into high-performance microcontrollers. The AM243x device is built for industrial applications, such as motor drives and remote I/O modules which require a combination of real-time communications and processing. The AM243x family provides scalable performance with up to four Cortex-R5F MCUs, one Cortex-M4F, and two instances of the gigabit TSN-enabled PRU_ICSSG in the Sitara microcontroller. The AM243x SoC architecture was designed to provide best-in-class real-time performance through the high-performance Arm Cortex-R5F cores, Tightly-Coupled Memory (TCM) banks, configurable SRAM partitioning, and dedicated low-latency paths to and from peripherals for rapid data movement in and out of the SoC.

This deterministic architecture allows for AM243x to process the tight control loops found in servo drives, while the peripherals such as FSI, GPMC, Enhanced Capture Modules (eCAP), PWMs, and encoder interfaces help enable a number of different architectures found in these systems. The SoC provides flexible industrial communications capability including full protocol stacks for EtherCAT targets, PROFINET devices, EtherNet or IP adapters, and IO-Link controllers. The PRU_ICSSG further provides capability for gigabit and TSN-based protocols. The PRU_ICSSG enables additional interfaces including a UART interface, sigma-delta decimation filters, and absolute encoder interfaces. Functional safety features can be enabled through the integrated Cortex-M4F along with dedicated peripherals that can be isolated from the rest of the SoC. AM243x also supports secure boot.

Figure 1-2 AM243x