Maxim Integrated has released the MAX3260, a low-power Arm Cortex-M4 Microcontroller (MCU) with a floating-point unit. The device protects all embedded memory for both flash and SRAM with error-code correction (ECC) for providing the highest reliability at a power consumption of 40µW/MHz. The MAX32670 executes commands for flash at 40% lower power and It is the lowest power solution for battery-operated sensor applications. It is also 50% smaller (1.8mm x 2.6mm WLP and 5mm x 5mm TQFN) than the competitor, hence the developers can reduce their solution size and material costs.
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. The MAX32670 prevents these types of catastrophic ramifications by protecting the entire memory footprint (384kB flash and 128kB SRAM) with ECC to prevent the bit flips and enhance reliability. The ECC allows the single-bit errors to get detected and corrected with hardware, hence it is difficult for the bit flip errors to have a negative impact on the application.
