Maxim Integrated MAX32670 microcontroller

The MAX32670 low-power Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller (MCU) with floating-point unit, from Maxim Integrated Products, has been designed with a high degree of protection for use in long lifetime and mission-critical applications.

In many industrial and IoT applications, high energy particles and other environmental challenges present the danger of bombarding memory and creating bit flips during the normal course of operations — especially as process nodes drop to 40 nm and lower. This can disrupt MCU operation and produce incorrect or even dangerous results.

To prevent catastrophic ramifications like these, the MAX32670 protects its entire memory footprint (384 KB flash and 128 KB SRAM) with error-code correction (ECC) to prevent bit flips. With ECC, single-bit errors are detected and corrected by hardware, making it difficult for bit flip errors to have a negative impact on the application.

With just 40 µW/MHz of active power consumption, the product is claimed to execute commands from flash at 40% lower power than the closest competitive industrial solution. The low-power solution for battery-operated sensor applications is also said to be 50% smaller than the closest competitor, coming in an ultrasmall 1.8 x 2.6 mm WLP and 5 x 5 mm TQFN, giving developers the opportunity to reduce solution size and material costs.