Make Your Industrial Design Smarter: Connect, Control And Communicate With The Sitara™ AM437x Industrial Single-Chip Drive

Today, Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) announced the new Sitara™ AM437x Industrial Development Kit (IDK). Allowing developers to differentiate and optimize motor control industrial system design the AM437x IDK aids in the evaluation of the multi-protocol, industrial communication and feedback interface capabilities of the highly integrated Sitara AM4379 and AM4377 processors based on the ARM® Cortex®-A9 core.

As the trend of connected drive solutions continues, intelligent industrial systems are adopting digital motor feedback systems. This digitization coupled with industrial Ethernet for communication provides higher efficiency in factory and energy sectors by reducing the latency between communications and control. The AM437x IDK combines motor control feedback and certified industrial Ethernet protocols providing a single-chip drive solution for Inverter, servo drive or AC premium drive. In addition to motor control applications, the kit aids in the development of other industrial automation applications such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and Human Machine Interface (HMI) among others. The AM437x IDK integrates certified, production-ready industrial communication protocols providing a developer friendly industrial system solution platform.

“Automated systems have a positive impact on the productivity in factories where yield can be significantly improved through fast and reliable networked communication,” said Punya Prakash, marketing manager at TI. “The Sitara AM437x processors, with the quad-core PRU, offer the highest degree of integration enabling multi-protocol communication and feedback interface for an industrial single-chip drive solution.”

Highlights of the Sitara AM437x IDK:

• A single-chip solution to bridge from motor control to higher level communications
• The IDK combines feedback and industrial communication protocols on a single chip allowing for additional integration and a smaller footprint
• The platform drives synchronization that aids in lower latency between communication and control
• Support for certified multi-protocol industrial Ethernet through the programmable real-time unit (PRU)
• Multi-protocol feedback interface for motor control though the PRU
• Field-oriented Control (FOC) for variable-frequency drives

Availability
The AM437x Industrial Development Kit (IDK) is available for $329 on the TI Store and TI authorized distributors. The AM437x Evaluation Module (EVM) for general purpose is also available on the TI Store and through distribution for $599 with mainline Linux software support.

Information on this production-ready development platform, including schematics, BOM, user guide, benchmarks, software, demos and more is available here. This free board support package and industrial software development kit can be downloaded today.