The ara™ processor is an Arm application processor designed to meet the complex processing demands of modern Industry 4.0 embedded products.
The AM654x and AM652x devices combine four or two Arm Cortex®-A53 cores with a dual Arm Cortex®-R5F MCU subsystem — including features designed to help customers achieve their end-product functional safety goals — and three Gigabit Industrial Communication Subsystems (PRU_ICSSG), delivering high-performance industrial control with SoC-supported industrial connectivity and processing capabilities for functional safety applications. The AM65xx is currently undergoing certification evaluation by TÜV SÜD in accordance with IEC 61508 requirements.
The four Arm Cortex®-A53 cores in the AM654x are distributed across two dual-core clusters with shared L2 memory to create two processing channels. The two Arm Cortex®-A53 cores in the AM652x are available via a single dual-core cluster and two single-core cluster options. Extensive ECC is included throughout on-chip memory, peripherals, and interconnects to ensure reliability. Features designed to help customers design systems that achieve their functional safety goals are included throughout the SoC (pending TÜV SÜD evaluation results). In addition to DMSC-managed granular firewalls, cryptographic acceleration and secure boot capabilities are available on select AM654x and AM652x devices.
The Arm Cortex®-A53 RISC CPU with Arm Neon™ extensions enables programmability, while the dual Arm Cortex®-R5F MCU subsystem can operate as two independent cores for general-purpose use or in lockstep mode to help meet the demands of functional safety applications. The PRU_ICSSG subsystem can be used to provide up to six industrial Ethernet ports — such as Profinet IRT, TSN, Ethernet/IP, or EtherCAT — or for standard Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
TI provides a comprehensive suite of software and development tools for the Arm cores, including Processor SDK Linux, Linux-RT, RTOS, and Android, as well as a C compiler and a debug interface for viewing source code execution. Functional safety and security documentation will be provided to help customers develop functional safety- or security-related systems.
TI AM6526BACDXEAF