Most of my life, programming and embedded microcontrollers has been a passion of mine. Over the course of my career I have gained experienced on many different architectures including some that are very specialized for specific applications. Even with current diverse market of specialized devices, I continue to find the general-purpose microcontroller market the most interesting. I believe this stems from how I first fell in love with computing. It can be traced back to the 7th grade when we were learning “Computer Literacy” with the Apple IIe computer. During the course, students learned how to code programs in the BASIC language. Projects spanned everything from simple graphics, printing and games. Simultaneous to that experience, I learned that my other 7th grade passion, playing the Nintendo™, was connected to the activities in computer literacy. Through a popular gaming magazine, I discovered that the chip that powered the Nintendo was the device that powered the computers at school, the venerable “6502”. That was the real moment of epiphany. If a CPU could be both a gaming system and a word processor, it could really *do anything* I wanted. It wasn’t long before I was digging into the intricate details of the 6502 to power my creations. The 6502 was my 1st general purpose CPU.
Fast forward 30 years … The exact same principal applies today. We have an incredible amount of power in small packages. There is a lot you can accomplish with seemly little. I am always on the lookout for new parts that may appear to be “vanilla” on the surface but have some hidden gems that really help me accomplish cool projects. The NXP LPC5500 series really appealed to my sensibilities as I immediately saw features that make it relevant to today’s design challenges. In the coming weeks I want to highlight some features of the LPC5500 series. This is not intended to be an all-encompassing review of the LPC5500 series, but I hope to hit on some highlights that could be beneficial to your design challenges. In this article we are going to focus a bit on the LPC55S69 device and its core platform. There is a lot under the hood!
First – It is actually 4 processors in 1!
From the block diagram in figure 1, one can see that there are two Arm® Cortex®-M33 cores. This by itself is an extremely useful feature given the low cost and low active power aspects of this device. I have made good use of the other LPC families with asymmetric cores (such as the LPC43xx device with a Cortex®-M4 and -M0). Having a 2nd core is very useful in offloading common tasks. In my experience with the LPC43xx, I used the Cortex®-M0 as a dedicated graphics co-processor to offload UI tasks from the Cortex®-M4 while was doing other time critical DSP operations.
In the case of the LPC55S69, both cores are Cortex®-M33. The Cortex®-M33 is a new offering from ARM based upon the ArmV8-M Instruction set architecture. Like the Cortex-M4, it has hardware floating point and DSP instructions but also includes TrustZone. TrustZone enables new security states to ensure your critical code can be protected. Another notable new feature is a co-processor interface for streamlining integration with dedicated co-processors. This feature is germane to the LPC5500 series as there are 2 coprocessors that we are about to talk about. You can learn more about the Cortex®-M33 here.
I can’t count the number of design scenarios where I wished I had an extra programmable CPU that could handle a task that might be extremely time critical but not actually need a lot of code space. For example, I have used OLED displays that have a non-standard I/O interface that needs bit-banged. It became a great opportunity to have the 2nd core do the work. You could even turn that 2nd core into a small graphics co-processor.
Figure 1. The LPC55S6x MCU Family Block Diagram
I mentioned four processors. So, where are the 3rd and 4th processors? Number three is hidden in the “DSP accelerator” block. The Cortex®-M4 core of which many other LPC microcontrollers are built upon have DSP specific instructions that can accelerate certain math functions. I have given seminars at the Embedded Systems Conference on using the DSP instructions in a general-purpose CPU scenario. The LPC55S69 DSP accelerator (A.K.A . PowerQuad) is a separate core whose sole purpose is to accelerate DSP specific tasks. While PowerQuad is not a pure general purpose CPU, it can perform tasks that would significantly burden one of the Cortex-M33 cores. In many cases you can get a 10x improvement over convention software implements of certain algorithms. PowerQuad covers all the common use cases such as Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs), IIR filters, convolution, trigonometric functions and matrix math. It has enough “brains” to do almost all the work so your main general purpose CPU(s) are free for other tasks. The PowerQuad is enabled by a very specific new feature in the Cortex-M33 (ARM®v8‑M specifically) that allow for coprocessors to be connected to the CPU through a simple interface. Data transfer to the coprocessor is low latency and can sustain a bandwidth of up to twice the memory interface to the processor.
Lastly, the 4th processor is another specialized core called “CASPER”. CASPER is high performance accelerator that is optimized for cryptographic computations. At its core, CASPER is a dual multiply-accumulate-shift engine that can operate of large blocks of data. CASPER has special access to 2 blocks of RAM so data can be accessed parallel. Applications of CASPER include accelerating cryptographic functions such as public key verification (i.e. TLS/SSL), hash computations or even blockchain. As CASPER is a general math engine, it is also possible to perform DSP operations in parallel with the PowerQuad. With a little bit of imagination, one could achieve quite a bit with minimal intervention from the general-purpose Cortex®-M33 cores.
Figure 2. PowerQuad (Left) and CASPER (right) Accelerators
While the PowerQuad and CASPER processing engines are not technically a 3rd and 4th general purposes cores, they can easily do the work that you might normally require of an entire CPU. We will be talking much more about these features in the future but the key take-away:
The PowerQuad DSP and CASPER accelerators are a powerful math engines that can allow you to number crunch a rate similar to dedicated DSPs. All this while still reserving your generally purpose processors to handle other system tasks.
All of this functionality is delivered on a low power 40nm process technology packaged in approachable footprints at a low price point. Interested yet? I know I am!
For more information, visit: www.nxp.com/LPC55S6x.