KeyStone based AM5K2Ex processors offer power-efficient solution

They require less than 10W of power, they’re efficient, reliable, scalable and they are now available. Make the switch to TI’s KeyStone™-based AM5K2Ex processors

Texas Instruments announced the availability of the KeyStone™-based AM5K2Ex processors. These processors enable customers to develop reliable, power and area efficient embedded systems within a limited power budget. AM5K2Ex devices are ideal for a variety of applications including avionics and defence, industrial routing and switching, enterprise gateway, and general-purpose embedded controllers.
Key features of AM5K2Ex processors:

• Superior performance under 10W with up to 19600 DMIPS from its quad-core ARM® Cortex®-A15s at 1.4GHz and a total of 6MB of on-chip memory
• Power management features that can shut down unused cores or peripherals, and can bring these elements back online quickly when the processing load increases
• A coherent 4MB L2 cache with ECC enhances the ease of use and performance of the processors and is the largest cache on an ARM processor in the TI portfolio.

The high performance per watt delivered by the SoC enables developers to build products with optimised size, weight and power (SWAP). Features integrated in the SOC include a security accelerator, a packet accelerator, an eight port 1GB Ethernet switch, a two port 10GB Ethernet switch and an optional DSP core.
“Aevision has found the AM5K2E04 processor to be an ideal solution for our next product because of its high level of performance and large number of Ethernet lanes with a power consumption that fits our design needs” said Mr. Shen Quanyong, general manager, Wuhan Aevision research and development centre. “TI’s AM5K2E04 processor finds the right balance of power and performance for the needs of this market, and the tools TI provides accelerate product development.”
Engineered for reliability, ideal for industrial, defence and general embedded applications
AM5K2Ex processors can support a wide temperature range of -40 to 100C to meet the demanding operating conditions developers face in the industrial market. They also have a lifecycle of 100,000 power-on hours (POH) and feature SER (Soft Error Rates) aligned to meet the reliability requirements of the industrial and defence markets. Full memory Error-Correcting Code (ECC) or parity support across all on-chip memory and external DDR memory interfaces enhances reliability in critical use cases.
The AM5K2Ex processors are part of TI’s scalable portfolio of ARM and DSP processors which includes devices that support multimedia, DSP-based off-load acceleration and optimised industrial accelerators to serve the challenging needs of industrial and defence customers.
Simplifying development with extensive ecosystem and hardware reference design
TI offers a complete software and hardware ecosystem which allows customers to jumpstart development. The software ecosystem includes a mainline Linux software development kit (SDK), C66x DSP libraries, and third party real-time operating system offerings including Wind River VxWorks and Green Hills INTEGRITY. Developers can start hands-on-evaluation today with the hardware reference design (XEVMK2EX).
“Highly reliable, power and space efficient processing power is an ever increasing need for embedded systems,” said Dinyar Dastoor, vice president of product management at Wind River. “By offering our VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems on TI’s AM5K2Ex platforms provide new levels of efficient ARM processing. The combination of our technologies helps our customers meet the challenging demands of multiple embedded computing applications.”
Availability and pricing
TI’s XEVMK2EX is available now through TI distribution partners or TI.com for $999. Additionally, the silicon is available now for $155/1KU (X66AK2E05XABD25).