OREANDA-NEWS. November 16, 2012. Fujitsu Semiconductor Asia Pte Ltd (FSAL) announced the launch of the new FM4 Family of 32-bit general purpose RISC microcontrollers based on ARM® Cortex™-M4 processor core, as well as a new FM0+ family adopting the Cortex-M0+ core. Fujitsu plans to release sample quantities of products in these new families within 2013, and will also begin full-scale production of these products later in the year. Combined with current FM3 Family of microcontrollers, the group of products featuring the Cortex-M4, M3, and M0+ processor cores will amount to a line-up of more than 700 different products. These products with a consistent architecture & flexibly now more broadly meet the growing customer need for higher performance and lower power consumption.

Fujitsu Semiconductor initially released its FM3 Family of 32-bit general purpose RISC microcontrollers based on the ARM Cortex-M3 processor core in 2010, and to date has developed 463 products within the line-up. While continuing to expand the FM3 Family with new products that feature high capacity flash memory and lower pin-counts, Fujitsu Semiconductor will further enhance its microcontroller line-up with the addition of two entirely new families starting from 2013, the FM4 Family and the FM0+ Family. The FM4 Family will cover the high-end product range, featuring higher performance and enhanced functionality, and will additionally feature DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and FPU (Floating-Point number processing Unit). The FM0+ Family will cover the low-end product range, featuring more compact, energy efficient, and lower-leakage-current products compared to the FM3 Family.

By bringing new products to the market that feature the latest 3 types of Cortex-M processor cores, customers will not only be able to select products to suit a broader range of applications, but they will also be able to utilize the enhanced scalability of each core to smoothly transition from low-end to high-end equipment, or vice-versa.