Nuvoton Technology launches NuMicro M251/M252 Series microcontroller

Click here for an overview of the NuMicroM251/M252 Series.

Nuvoton Technology Corporation, a microcontroller platform solution provider, has launched a low-power, industrial grade NuMicroM251/M252 Series designed for industrial control applications. It’s based on the Arm Cortex-M23 secure core for Armv8-M architecture, running up to 48 MHz with up to 256 KB Flash and 32 KB SRAM. The power consumption in the deep power-down mode is down to 2.0 μA.

The NuMicro M251/M252 Series also provides five kinds of power modes and three types of secure protect mechanisms to satisfy the sensor-node devices, which offers power consumption to IIoT applications.

Features include:

A wide-supply voltage ranges from 1.8 to 5.5V
An operating temperature ranges from -40° to 105° C
Rich package types from 20 to 128-pin
Five power modes for different operating scenarios
An integrated RTC with independent VBAT to support the low-power mode
ΜART supports transmission rates of up to 9600 bps in power-down mode to make power management more efficient in battery devices
In terms of low-power consumption, expect a 138 μA/MHz in normal run mode and 60 μA/MHz in idle mode
The power-down mode current with RTC on is down to 2.5μA, and the deep power-down current is less than 1.4 μA

Additionally, the NuMicro M251/ M252 Series supports powerful and rich peripherals, such as Programmable Serial I/O (PSIO), up to six pins of Voltage Adjustable Interface (VAI), External Bus Interface (EBI), Universal Serial Control Interface (USCI), QSPI, SPI/I²S, I2C, Smart Card Interface (ISO-7816-3), Watchdog timer, RTC, and up to 24 channels of PWM.

Those peripherals make it highly suitable for connecting comprehensive external modules. For high-performance analog features, it integrates up to a 16-channel 12-bit 880 kSPS SAR ADC to sample the sensor data without delay, one Operational Amplifier (OPA) to amplify small signal for motor control, built-in five levels of internal voltage reference to provide precise voltage to ADC and ACMP, one 12-bit 1 MSPS voltage type DAC, and two rail-to-rail analog comparator (ACMP) to reduce the external components and form factor.

The NuMicro M251/ M252 Series provides up to eight channels of Nuvoton Patented Programmable Serial I/O (PSIO), accompanied with PDMA hardware that offers several proprietary serial interfaces, such as DMX512, HDQ, 1-wire, Microwire, and programmable encoder. This is no matter the standard interface or proprietary interface can be realized by PSIO interface, which can not only adding the feasibility of proprietary interface but also shorten the complexity of program but to ease the loading from CPU.

To protect customer’s intellectμAl property, NuMicro M251/M252 Series provides several mechanisms, by using flash-lock bit can prevent the program from being read out by an external programmer, built-in one eXecute-Only-Memory (XOM) region and four Memory Protection Unit (MPU) to protect critical codes, and one Tamper detection pin to detect the state transition status. NuMicro M251/M252 Series also equipped with 96-bit UID (Unique Identification) and 128-bit UCID (Unique Customer Identification).

Nuvoton provides a safety library that can be compliant with the IEC-60730 requirement for Class B safety function to raise safety function for customers’ end products.

Moreover, Nu-Link and Nu-Link-2-Pro debuggers are available for evalμAtion and product development. Third-Party IDEs such as Keil MDK, IAR EWARM, and NuEclipse IDE with GNU GCC compilers are also supported.