Dualcore DCIC9907 Industrial Microcontroller with Two ARM Cores Targeted at Time-critical Industrial Control Applications

Update: DUALCORE Semiconductor has stopped it's operation

Nuernberg, Germany - February 24, 2006 - Dualcore Semiconductor™ announces a new, unique industrial SoC (System on Chip) Microcontroller DCIC9907™ which contains two ARM 946E cores, two CAN channels, two 10/100 Mbit Ethernet MACs with HW extension for real-time protocols, and a versatile motion control logic capability, specifically designed for time-critical and other industrial control applications. DCIC9907™ is destined to be the central digital element of a advanced Servo System Platforms.

Although optimized for motion control applications, DCIC9907™'s key features will find application in a wide variety of industrial communication situations, such as:

Field bus controller node (Can 2.0B, ETHERNET Powerlink)
Field bus to Ethernet Network (bridge/firewall, gateway /TCP/IP, web server, firewall)
Real-Time Ethernet control node (EPL Manager Node[Master] or control node [slave])
Real-Time data acquisition and measurement (precision time/capture and intelligent ADC/DAC interfaces)

DCIC9907™ is a highly integrated circuit, which supports many high-level functions for controlling and supervising industrial applications. Additionally, DCIC9907™ allows you to control applications under difficult real-time conditions, such as tasks which need accurately predicted time performance under all conditions, even when running in parallel with an operating system. Within DCIC9907™, one of the two ARM cores can be used for complex real-time control and the second one for system infrastructure, such as HMI (Human Machine Interface) and the required communication interfaces. For this purpose, the versatile real-time operating system EUROS (www.euros-embedded.com) has been ported to DCIC9907™.

The two 10/100 MBit Ethernet MAC ports have hardware extensions which support real time protocols via Ethernet. Because there are few affordable solutions available in the market today with such functionality, the new DCIC9907™ is ideally suited to time-critical, cost-conscious control applications. Features incorporated in DCIC9907™ are the direct result of feedback from key industrial users; for instance, DCIC9907™'s includes 16 hardware interrupts controlled via the internal VIC (Vector Interrupt Controller) with a total of 32 interrupts available (16 Software + 16 Hardware). An additional unique feature is a complex-motion control block integrated into DCIC9907™. This control block has all the built-in features necessary to control and supervise any kind of electronic motor directly from the IC. For example, it is possible to control 3 PWM channels in parallel. DCIC9907™ can be clocked up to 128 MHz and provides sufficient performance even for very demanding control applications. With 109 I/O pins, DCIC9907™ represents a highly flexible System on Chip (SoC).

DCIC9907™ was designed to keep power dissipation as low as possible - so no need for heat sinks or even fans! This means that the form factor of customer products can be reduced to a minimum, system costs are decreased and MTBF (Mean Time between Failure) is increased because critical heat on silicon will not be reached.

DCIC9907™ will be available from March 2006 in an industrial temperature range 305-pin BGA package at under $US20 in volume.

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