Starter kit aids CAN-based development

A new embedded systems starter kit from Toshiba Electronics aims to significantly simplify the design, prototyping and debugging of high-speed, CAN-based industrial and automotive designs.

A new embedded systems starter kit from Toshiba Electronics aims to significantly simplify the design, prototyping and debugging of high-speed, CAN-based industrial and automotive designs using the industry's latest 32bit CISC microcontroller technology.

Toshiba's TOPAS900/H2 industrial and automotive starter kit is a bundled package of hardware and software components that allows designers to quickly evaluate and begin developing with the company's TMP94FD53F 32bit CISC MCU with integrated CAN controller.

The kit consists of a compact evaluation board that is small enough to be inserted into the target application, along with in-circuit programming and debugging tools that aid the prototyping of TMP94FD53F embedded designs.

The TOPAS900/H2 starter kit's evaluation board features a TMP94FD53F microcontroller and a CAN transceiver chip along with all of the passive components and connectors required for 'out-of-box' operation.

Pin connectors allow for the board to be extended to a standard PGA-104 socket.

In addition to the board, the starter kit incorporates Toshiba's TMPro debugger with ROM monitor, which allows in-circuit programming and debugging using a Windows-based PC.

Based on Toshiba's TLCS900/H2 processor core, the TMP94FD53F has been specifically designed to deliver performance and power consumption levels that are comparable to RISC devices while it offers all the software flexibility of a CISC architecture.

Its targets are CAN-based industrial and automotive applications requiring event control and interrupt handling.

With 16Kbyte of internal RAM and 512Kbyte of Flash EEPROM, the microcontroller allows designers to minimise external memory.

As well as the core and the memory, the microcontroller also features the built-in CAN controller, two UARTs, 70 input/output ports, integrated timers and watchdog timer, a dual-channel I2C interface and a 12-channel 10bit A/D convertor.

The TLCS-900/H2 microcontroller core uses an internal 32bit structure, operates at up to 20MHz, and offers a maximum performance rating of 20MIPS.

Key to the core's high performance are four general-purpose register banks for fast context switching and improved real-time control, and an eight channel DMA controller that can perform data transfers at speeds of up to 16Mbyte/s.

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