Microchip has expunged some of the tricky bits of system design with its ARM926EJ-S based SAM9X60 MPU, by introducing a system-on-module that pre-pairs the processor with 1Gbit of DDR2 dram, a 4Gbit of NAND flash and 1kbit of serial eeprom – on top of the chip’s own 64kbyte of internal sram.
Actually built around a 600MHz SAM9X60D1G, and called SAM9X60D1G-SOM, the 28 x 28mm footprint module also gets bare-metal or RTOS support through the company’s MPLAB XC32 compiler and Harmony3 develop environment, as well as BuildRoot, Yocto or OpenWRT Linux distributions.
The inclusion of a MCP16501 power management IC means that the module only need a single 3 to 5V supply rail, and 1.8V, 3.3V and an adjustable 0.9-3.7V (300mA) are available on pads for external use. THere are anothe couple of power inputs: 1.6-3.6V for back-up and 1.6-3.6V for the on-board QSPI interface.
Clocking is also dealt with on the substrate, with a 24MHz Mems oscillator for the main clock, a 32kHz crystal for the slow clock, and a 25MHz mems oscillator for Ethernet – the module also includes a 10Base-T/100Base-TX Ethernet PHY.
As well as Ethernet, the following interfaces share the collective I/O: RGB LCD (up to 24bit), CMOS camera, half-bridge class-D stereo, 85x I/Os (11 wake-up), 6x ADC inputs, 2x CAN interfaces, 2x SD/MMC (SDIO), 4x PWM, QSPI, SSC and I2S.
The eeprom has a pre-programmed EUI-48 MAC address, and security precautions are backed by on-chip OTP secure key storage, hardware encryption for TDES, AES and SHA, and random number generator.
Microchip describes the module as “hand-solderable” – the back of the module is flat and the pads are wrap-around and castellated – but bear in mind a CR2032 coin cell is not much smaller and it has 152 pads on a 650μm pitch, so not for the faint-of-heart.
Development hardware can be found in the SAM9X60D1G Curiosity (EV40E67A) evaluation kit.
