TI Hercules™ MCUs certified to meet ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 functional safety standards to ASIL D and SIL 3 levels of safety integrity
- TÜV SÜD certifies MCUs capable of supporting stringent functional safety standards for automotive, industrial and general functional-safety-related applications.
- New LaunchPad development kits ease development on certified MCUs.

HOUSTON, Dec. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Automotive and industrial systems are becoming more and more sophisticated, increasing the burden on OEMs to ensure the functional safety of their systems. To help customers mitigate this challenge, Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) today announced that its Hercules™ TMS570LS12x/11x and RM46x microcontrollers (MCUs) are certified by TÜV SÜD to meet the relevant requirements of ISO 26262:2011 and IEC 61508:2010 functional safety standards to ASIL D and SIL 3 levels of safety integrity. This helps reduce the time and effort OEMs spend taking their products through certification. TI also announces two new LaunchPad development kits, providing low-cost, entry-level options for developers who want to assess the certified MCUs' functional safety features and performance.

TI's certified MCUs
Building on the previously completed SafeTI™ hardware development process certification and successful Hercules MCU platform architecture concept assessment, the Hercules TMS570LS12x/11x MCUs have been certified to meet relevant requirements of ISO 26262:2011 and IEC 61508:2010 to ASIL D and SIL 3 levels of safety integrity. These MCUs help developers create functional-safety-related applications for the automotive and transportation industry, offering frequencies up to 180 MHz. The automotive-qualified TMS570LS12x/11x MCUs offer a variety of performance, memory and peripheral options to help meet a range of system needs.

The high-performance Hercules RM46x MCUs are certified to meet the relevant requirements of IEC 61508:2010 to SIL 3 levels of safety integrity. These MCUs support industrial and general-purpose functional-safety-related applications and offer frequencies up to 220 MHz. The RM46x MCUs provide various performance and memory configurations as well as targeted motor control capabilities.

Hercules MCUs integrate a high level of diagnostic features that detect and respond to runtime faults and help establish a "safe island" to perform safety-critical processing without significant software overhead. Integrated diagnostics include dual ARM® Cortex®-R4 floating-point CPUs in lockstep, CPU and SRAM built-in-self-test (BIST), and transaction-based error correction codes (ECC) on the flash and RAM interfaces and memory, which can detect dual-bit faults and correct single-bit faults.

Hercules LaunchPads ease evaluation
Developers can evaluate the TÜV SÜD-certified Hercules TMS570LS12x/11x and RM46x MCUs today with two new LaunchPad development kits. These modular, quick-launch development tools each contain a development board, USB cable and a quick start guide to jumpstart out-of-the-box evaluation. On-board emulation and Hercules MCU functional safety demos allow exploration of the advanced functional safety features integrated in Hercules MCUs. The LaunchPad kits offer HALCoGen software – a GUI-based code generation tool that allows developers to accelerate code development on Hercules MCUs—available for download and supported by the latest version of TI's Eclipse-based Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE).

SafeTI design packages
TMS570LS12x/11x and RM46x microcontrollers are part of SafeTI design packages for functional safety, which provide functional-safety-related documentation, support forums, tools and software to make it easier for OEMs to achieve functional safety certification and accelerate time to market with their functional safety critical systems.

Pricing and availability
Hercules TMS570LS12x/11x and RM46x MCUs are qualified, released to production, certified by TÜV SÜD and ready for use in your next functional safety application. Hercules TMS570LS12x/11x and RM46x MCUs are available starting less than $10 USD in 10,000-unit quantities.

The Hercules TMS570LS12x/11x LaunchPad (LAUNCHXL-TMS57012) and the RM46x LaunchPad (LAUNCHXL-RM46) are available today at the low cost of $19.99 through the TI eStore. Once developers have familiarized themselves with the Hercules TMS570LS12x/11x and RM46x MCUs using the new LaunchPads, they can take designs to the next level with a variety of other Hercules MCU tools.

For more information

Innovation is at the core of TI MCUs
Beginning with the foundation of leading process technology and adding unique system architecture, intellectual property and real-world system expertise, TI continues its 20+ years of MCU innovation with low-power and performance MCUs. With unique products for ultra-low power, low-power performance and security communications, to real-time control, control and automation, and safety, designers can accelerate time to market with TI's ecosystem of tools, software, wireless connectivity solutions, extensive Design Network offerings and technical support.

About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is a global semiconductor design and manufacturing company that develops analog ICs and embedded processors. By employing the world's brightest minds, TI creates innovations that shape the future of technology. TI is helping more than 100,000 customers transform the future, today. Learn more at www.ti.com.

Trademarks
Hercules, SafeTI and TI E2E are trademarks of Texas Instruments Incorporated. All registered trademarks and other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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SOURCE Texas Instruments

For further information: Tara Stratton, Golin, 972-341-2562, tstratton@golinharris.com, or Randi Williams, Texas Instruments, 214-567-4640, rwilliams@ti.com