RM44L520: RM44x what are the core options and how do you use them

Hello Neil,

First, Wikipedia should be taken with some skepticism as it is built from independent inputs with unknown intentions.

With that said, your question is very general but I will do my best to either answer or provide a link to material on ti.com that can help answer.

First, the Hercules devices do have 2 cores operating in lockstep. One of these is technically considered only a diagnostic as its sole purpose is to be used as a checker of the operation of the first. All outputs and inputs to both CPUs are fed into a comparator module so that any variation of operation of the two CPUs can be considered a fault to be handled at a system level. This type of parallel operation of the CPUs effectively provides very nearly 100% diagnostic coverage of the CPU operation (if not actually 100%).

In regard to ECC, all of the Hercules devices have ECC on Flash and RAM and some critical bits in internal registers. Our highest performance MCU (TMS570LC43x and RM57x) also add ECC protection to some key peripheral RAMs such as MibSPI, DCAN, etc. (note the high end MCU also adds additional lockstep features such as lockstep VIM (interrupt controller) and several other safety feature enhancements).

Each of these safety features are enabled through the user code/software. TI also provides a code generation/device configuration tool called HalCoGen that is used to generate the Hardware Abstraction Layer driver code to configure the device and peripherals in a way consistent with your application needs.

For more information on the Hercules architecture and features, please see the Hercules specific device product pages or have a look at the Hercules information included on TI.com\safeti

Additional information on how to use the device can be found in application notes related to the device family and in the training materials located at this link: training.ti.com/.../embedded-processors-microcontrollers-mcu