The Sitara AM437x Industrial Single-Chip Drive Solution for Multi-Protocol Industrial Communication and Motor Feedback is Now Available.

The new Sitara^TM AM437x Industrial Development Kit (IDK) is an evaluation and development platform for the smart industrial solutions offered by the highly integrated Sitara^TM AM4379 and AM4377 processors of the Texas Instruments. It uses the ARM® Cortex^®-A9 core, QSPI-NOR flash and 1 GB DDR3 including a built-in 2Mp camera. “The AM437x IDK allows developers to differentiate and optimize motor control industrial system design”, says TI.

Industries’ aim for digitization together with industrial Ethernet increases efficiency by reducing the latency between communications and control. Specialized AM437x IDK boards combine motor control feedback and certified industrial Ethernet protocols providing a single-chip drive solution for Inverter, servo drive or AC premium drive.

The AM437x family has a quad-core Programmable Real-time Units (PRU) with real-time cores and direct-I/O access and small footprint important in industrial automation. Thus, AM437x IDK caters industrial automated system operations for target applications such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and Human Machine Interface (HMI) among others.

Highlights:

• SoC-type solution between motor control and higher-level communication protocols

• The IDK allows more integration and combines feedback such as EnDat 2.2 connectivity and industrial communication (EtherCAT) protocols on a low-footprint single chip

• The platform drives synchronization that aids in lower latency between communication and control

• Support for certified multi-protocol industrial Ethernet through the programmable real-time unit (PRU)

• Multi-protocol feedback interface for motor control though the PRU

• Field-oriented Control (FOC) for variable-frequency drives

For further details and system requirements, click Sitara^TM AM43tx IDK.

Availability:

TI offers their developer-friendly AM437x Industrial Development Kit (IDK) for only $329, which can be purchased on the TI Store and any TI-authorized distributors. The IDK board includes Code Composer Studio integrated development environment (IDE), application stacks for industrial protocols and other industrial application samples. The general-purpose AM437x Evaluation Module (EVM) including a mainline Linux support is also available for $599 on TI Store. Information on this production-ready development platform, including schematics, BOM, user guide, benchmarks, software, demos and more is available here. For Sitara^TM processors’ industrial software development kit (SDK) visit SYS/BIOS.