SPRUJB6B November 2024 – May 2025 AM2612
The AM261x Sitara Arm® Microcontrollers are built to meet the complex real-time processing and control needs of next-generation industrial and automotive embedded projects. AM261x uniquely combines advanced computing with industry leading real-time control peripherals to meet the growing performance needs of applications such as HEV/EV (traction inverters, on-board chargers, and DC-DC converters), motor drives, renewable energy, energy storage, and other general real-time constrained systems. AM261x combines up to two Cortex-R5F MCUs, a real-time control subsystem (CONTROLSS), a Hardware Security Module (HSM), and two instances of Sitara’s PRU-ICSS. AM261x is designed for advanced motor control, industrial communications and remote IO, and digital power control applications.
The two R5F cores are arranged in a cluster with 256KB of shared tightly coupled memory (TCM) per core along with 1.5MB of shared SRAM. The multiple Arm® cores can be optionally programmed to run in lock-step option for different functional safety configurations. Extensive ECC is included on on-chip memory, peripherals, and interconnect for enhanced reliability. Cryptographic acceleration and secure boot are also available on devices in addition to granular firewalls managed by the HSM for developers to design the most secure systems. AM261x also includes a Trigonometric Math Unit (TMU) on each R5F core for accelerating trigonometric functions.
The Real-Time Control Subsystem (CONTROLSS) is a revolutionary subsystem integrated into the device. CONTROLSS contains multiple digital and analog control peripherals including: ADC, CMPSS, EPWM, ECAP, and EQEP, among others to enable efficient execution of critical sense/process/actuate real-time signal chain control loops. The integrated crossbar (XBAR) infrastructure enables flexible configuration and routing of external signals to internal ports and internal signals to external pins.
The Flash Subsystem (FSS) provides access to external Flash devices via Octal Serial Peripheral Interface (OSPI) along with Encryption/Decryption, Authentication and in-line ECC protection (referred as ECCM). The FSS includes one OSPI (OSPI0). The OptiFlash module features Region Based Address Translation (RAT), Fast Local Copy (FLC), and Remote L2 cache (RL2) functions that greatly improve Flash performance on the device. There is also a second instance of Octal Flash (OSPI) Controller, referred to as OSPI1. The OSPI1 is added for supporting FOTA applications without a RWW flash, and to provide a cost-efficient SRAM expansion. OSPI1 does not support OptiFlash.
The two PRU-ICSS instances in AM261x provide the flexible industrial communications capability necessary to run EtherCAT®, PROFINET®, Ethernet/IP™, or for standard Ethernet connectivity and custom I/O interfacing. The PRUs also enable additional interfaces in the SoC including sigma delta decimation filters and absolute encoder interfaces. The CPSW interface also provides two standard Ethernet ports.
AM261x supports one dual role USB2.0 port with an integrated PHY for firmware upgrade or diagnostic support. Hosts can also connect through USB instead of Industrial Ethernet and boot the device.
TI provides a complete set of microcontroller software and development tools for the AM261x family of microcontrollers in addition to multiple pin-to-pin compatible devices for scalability and ease of use.