EEDEHD ARM Cortex Heterogeneous MCU Architectures
This is a listing of "novel" ARM Cortex solutions, which includes:
Multi-core offers, with different cores in particular (such as pairing an M4F with an M7).
SoC offers (such as pairing an Applications MCU / MPU with an Embedded/Realtime MCU).
Heterogeneous computing solutions (such as pairing an MCU with an FPGA).
It is exceedingly critical to understand that all engineering design decisions (1) start with project-initiating requests/constrains/specifications, (2) must of course utilize solutions currently available, (3) ensure that the entire design process is meeting project needs in a proper, well-engineered, economical, and safe manner, and (4) always involve making trade-offs as needed.
It is therefore extremely important to understand our project parameters. Project parameters are: an MCU for an embedded application, most often communicating with a separate FPGA IC, communicating over multiple interface protocols, and offloading data via fast and bulk transfers to a host PC (via USB, Ethernet, SDCard, etc).
While we are as blown away by currently available Computer in a Module / Computer on Board / Single Board Computer offers that give us a very affordable SoC with an Application CPU as just one core, and with computing power on paper equivalent to a ten-year-old laptop, such SBCs are NOT our intended target market. An SBC and such SoCs targeting these SBC/cellphone/consumer electronics markets have the following issues for our application:
This is NOT an embedded application.
Even at these low power levels, low prices, and high-efficiency cores, these solutions are NOT efficient, especially given idiotic use of multiple layers of software (OS, application, interpreter, interpreted language, shell/terminal, etc, etc, etc) just to accomplish the task of blinking an LED (the most typical application for such a powerful SBC running at a GHz, and doing a billion computations a second just to toggle an LED under control from a remote browser nonetheless being in the hand of a person in the same physical room as the "IoT" device).
Research was done from DigiKey listings.
TODO usual DigiKey bullshit disclaimers.
From categories:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcontrollers/685
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microprocessors/694
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-system-on-chip-soc/777
