‘Arduino’ board gets record-breaking multicore processor

This is certainly a high performance  Arduino board with the processor running at 200MHz and with 4Mbyte of flash, 128kbit of data flash and 500k of RAM.

As a demonstration of the processor’s performance, it was recently used to break the world record for a machine solving Rubik’s cube in 637 milliseconds.

Infineon designed the Aurix TC275 processor for engine management systems, ABS systems and industrial motor drives in German cars.

It is now in an Arduino-format embedded module from Hitex UK, and it can be bought from RS.

According to the company, writing on the RS DesignSpark blog, the idea to use the higher performance processor came about when a placement student with them was using the Arduino Uno to control four servos in a model aeroplane.  Unfortunately the combination of real time servo control and serial comms to the RC receiver was overloading the 16MHz  AVR Atmega 328p.  It was decided to use the Aurix TC275, which was being used in an automotive project, on an Arduino Due format board.

This put three 200MHz 32-bit CPU cores on a shared bus, each with their own local RAM but sharing a common flash ROM. The peripherals (timers, port pins, Ethernet, serial ports etc.) are also shared, with each core having full access to any peripheral.

The TC275 CPU core design has a basic 5ns cycle time which means you can get typically around 150 to 200 32-bit instructions per microsecond. There is also a floating point unit on each core so using floating point variables does not slow things down significantly.

The standard Arduino IDE can be used, provided that the ShieldBuddy add-in has been installed. Programs can be written in exactly the same way as on an ordinary Arduino.  However to make best use of the multicore TC275 processor, there are some specially implemented macros and functions available.

The Arduino IDE has been extended to allow the generation of Aurix instructions using the Hightec GCC compiler, available for free download.