Luminary Micro (www.luminarymicro.com) designs, markets and sells ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontrollers (MCUs) for embedded and industrial applications. The Austin, Texas-based company is ARM’s lead partner for Cortex-M3, delivering the world’s first silicon implementation of this revolutionary microcontroller core with the introduction of Luminary Micro’s Stellaris™ family of MCUs.

Luminary Micro Stellaris microcontrollers are targeted at industrial control and embedded consumer applications. The embedded microcontroller market is a very large market, with over $26B in revenue this year. It is also extremely fragmented, with more than 40 suppliers feeding in excess of 50 architectures into the market, yet no architecture holds as much as a 5 percent share. Traditionally, the microcontroller market segments along the size of the CPU data path as 4-, 8-, 16-, or 32-bit. According to Gartner, 32-bit devices are the fastest growing segment of the MCU market, with 25 percent of the MCU market dollars. With double-digit annual compound growth rates, another analyst group, Instat, expects the combined revenue from 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers to reach approximately twice the revenue from 8-bit microcontrollers.

A microcontroller is an integrated microprocessor designed for use in embedded systems. The focus is on control capabilities and cost-effectiveness for a given form factor. All the memory, peripherals, and interfaces that are needed are included on the chip with the CPU – the original system-on-chip device. The applications tend to feature control over computation, and are interrupt-driven, requiring a real-time response to stimulus. An embedded application or embedded system is any kind of electronic control or computing application that is not a desktop, laptop, or server. The majority of all uses of processors are in embedded applications, encompassing more than 6 billion microcontrollers shipped a year (Gartner).

Major demand segments in the microcontroller market can be summarized as follows:

	TAM	# of OEMs	Design Cycle (months)	Production Cycle (months)
Industrial	$9 Bn	>> 10,000	15 - 18	26 - 60
Consumer	$6 Bn	Hundreds	12 - 18	6 - 18
Automotive	$11 Bn	Tens	> 24	48 - 72

In the broad industrial category, with a Stellaris-appropriate Total Available Market of $1.4B in 2006, segments that will find Luminary Micro’s Stellaris microcontrollers to be of use are:

• Industrial applications comprised of data measurement, analysis, and logging;
• Power applications, especially smart charging, power metering, and adaptive power utilization applications;
• Medical data capture and logging applications;
• Motion and motor control applications;
• Security and building automation applications, such as entry access controls; and
• Commercial automation, such as parking systems and money transaction machines.

In the consumer category, with a Stellaris-appropriate Total Available Market of $2.3B in 2006, segments that will utilize Stellaris microcontrollers include:

• Home automation and control systems;
• Home security systems; and
• Electronic toys and games.

The motor control segment is undergoing one of the largest transformations in its history. In this market, electronic controls are replacing mechanical and electro-mechanical solutions, while high-performance digital controllers are replacing analog controls. This transformation is occurring because modern electronic controls using sophisticated control algorithms can double the power efficiency of a typical motor. This can mean either cutting the power consumption in half or reducing the physical motor size by 50 percent – all while making the motor dramatically more quiet by replacing mechanical contacts. With more than half of the power generated in the United States being consumed by electronic motors, it is easy to see the economic imperative in this transformation.

Embedded applications markets are heavily impacted by cost, which is influenced by memory and size. Utilizing the Cortex-M3 core technology to lower costs in silicon, system, and development, the Stellaris family brings high value to these applications, with its lead entry-level devices offering 20 MHz, 32-bit performance in areas previously thought to be limited to 8- and 16-bit MCUs. Now, designers can enter the ARM architecture for the same price as 8- and 16-bit: and with the entry-level Stellaris microcontroller, they can do it for $1.00! The most recently-announced Stellaris microcontrollers incorporate such advanced features as an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) with 8 input channels, and Quadrature Encoder Input for motion applications, 50MHz operation, and larger flash memory to accommodate the more algorithmicallyintensive higher-end applications such as digital industrial controllers or brushless DC motors.

Embedded microcontrollers sell to a fragmented and distribution-dominated market. There are over 100,000 microcontroller applications in production today, with over athousand development kits shipped every day.

Years of working with embedded systems developers has convinced us that time to market is really driven by the software in an embedded design. This is borne out by Embedded Systems Programming magazine’s annual user survey, which ranks the important microcontroller selection criteria as:

• Software tools and development environments
• Performance
• Price
• Functionality

The ARM community is widely acknowledged to have the industry’s leading tools and software in the industry’s most vibrant third-party ecosystem.

According to VDC, over 48 percent of production costs are attributed to software development. In market surveys by both VDC and EE Times magazine, somewhere between 44 percent and 57 percent of embedded designs are either late or cancelled.

Together, Luminary Micro and ARM have the answer to the embedded software developer’s dilemma – Luminary Micro’s Stellaris family of microcontrollers features the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller core, which allows us to provide ARM code compatibility for the same price as current 8- and 16-bit solutions. Cortex-M3 was architected to bring 32-bit compatibility to the 8- and 16-bit microcontroller space. The Thumb2 instruction set provides up to 4 times better code density than an 8-bit 8051 microcontroller.

Cortex-M3 also features powerful software debug capabilities with internal hardware breakpoint support and low pin count serial wire debug capability. With a deterministic interrupt response of just 12 cycles, or only 6 cycles for tail-chained interrupts, Cortex- M3 also features a power-efficient 90 uW/MHz with a stellar 1.25 DMIPS/MHz of performance.

In addition, Cortex-M3 dramatically extends ARM7 capabilities in microcontroller applications. In our benchmarks against ARM7TMDI-based MCUs, Stellaris Cortex-M3 MCUs provided a two-fold improvement in interrupt performance, and 4x improvement in MCU control applications performance. In addition, the compact architecture of the Thumb2 instruction set required only half the flash code size as ARM7TDMI MCU applications.

Stellaris microcontrollers appeal to the embedded market in other compelling ways: In addition to the many performance, price, and functional advantages of Stellaris MCUs, ARM enjoys the broadest knowledge base of any core in the world. A 2004 survey by EDN China found the ARM architecture to be the most preferred architecture for new embedded developments in China. Today, ARM partners ship silicon at greater than 1.5 billion units a year, and the ARM architecture holds a greater than 80 percent market share in embedded 32-bit processors. No other microprocessor architecture can lay claim to these numbers, but just as importantly, being a part of the ARM community gives developers access to hundreds of third-party supporters; reduced development costs; and increased efficiency as they develop product roadmaps and migration paths with compatible cores and more manufacturing options. The openness of ARM silicon solutions is the catalyst that allows the creation of portable people and portable code. The addition of Luminary Micro’s Stellaris microcontrollers aims to extend the openness of the ARM architecture into the wider 8- and 16-bit embedded market.

Luminary Micro began sampling a global program of alpha customers under nondisclosure agreement in Q4 2005. Today, the company has customers developing applications such as industrial field measurement instrumentation; power sequencing control in complex electronic systems; medical instrumentation data aggregation; motor controllers of a variety of sizes and applications; alARM systems, access systems, and combined time-keeping and access control systems; modularized parking systems; GPRS-based tracking systems; home security systems; and home metering applications.

Stellaris silicon and full development kits are available today. The company can be reached at 1 512 279 8800 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Product orders can be placed at www.luminarymicro.com or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; through Mouser Electronics at www.mouser.com/luminarymicro or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Additional company information can be obtained from the company’s Corporate Backgrounder.