Toshiba Electronics has announced the availability of an embedded development kit that will speed the design, development, integration and testing of automotive electronic control unit applications that need to comply with the ISO 26262 functional safety standard for road vehicles, according to the company.
The IAR KickStart kit provides all of the hardware, software and tools to develop an embedded application around the company's TMPM350FDFTG microcontroller. This ARM-based microcontroller has been designed to meet the needs of electric power steering control applications.
Operating at up to 88MHz, the microcontroller combines an ARM Cortex-M3 CPU core with 512kbyte of embedded nano Flash ROM and 48kbyte of RAM. An integrated dual channel CAN controller of version 2.0B and motor control circuitry minimise the need for external components, claims the company. The result is a kit that provides a single-chip solution for both control and functional safety.
The kit comprises a microcontroller evaluation board, IAR's visualSTATE graphical design environment and the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE (integrated development environment) for ARM-based processors. A J-Link hardware debug probe that connects via USB to a host PC provides JTAG (joint test action group) debugging functionality in accordance with ARM specifications. Full documentation and application code are also provided within the kit.
In addition to the microcontroller, the kit's evaluation board provides a JTAG connector for programming and debugging, CAN, USB, RS232 and UART connectivity, a power jack and four user-programmable buttons. The board also incorporates eight user LEDs, a potentiometer input analogue signal and two on-board crystal oscillators.
The Embedded Workbench IDE provides a complete and easy-to-use set of C/C++ cross compiler and debugger tools and is integrated with the J-Link debug probe.
The microcontroller provides functional safety compliance through a distributed safety architecture built around tightly coupled fault supervisors. These supervisors run algorithms that monitor the operation of each of the microcontroller's functional blocks using fR (faultrobust) blocks of safety IP implemented close to key functions such as the CPU, buses, timers and memory. An fRNET block collects diagnostic information from each individual function while the company's hardware diagnostic blocks provide further safety monitoring. The kit is provided with the necessary software code to initialise this on-board safety structure.
