Texas Instruments' (TI) AM64x is a 64-bit Arm series processor designed with safety features, suitable for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), motor drives, remote I/O, and industrial robots. The high-end processor in this series, the AM6442, features seven cores, including two Cortex-A53 application cores, four Cortex-R5F real-time cores, and one Cortex-M4F independent core.

To my knowledge, the documentation for this processor first appeared in January 2021. Subsequently, TI also announced the processor in a blog post in February, though its title was somewhat vague. It wasn't until early May that it was first featured by Embedded Computing, the world's largest electronic engineering community. In addition to the processor itself, TI also offers an AM64x Starter Kit and a full-featured AM64x Evaluation Kit. Furthermore, several companies are now preparing development boards and modules, which I will introduce further below.

TI AM64x Processor

TI AM64x Specifications

AM64x Key Features and Specifications:

The processor offers a considerable number of boot options including UART, I2C, OSPI/QSPI flash, SPI flash, parallel NOR flash, parallel NAND flash, SD, eMMC, USB 2.0, PCIe, and Ethernet interfaces.

AM64x Six Part Parameters Diagram

There are currently six AM64x parts: AM6442, AM6441, AM6422, AM6421, AM6412, and AM6411. They appear to be pin-to-pin compatible, with the only differences being in the support for Cortex-A53 / Cortex-R5F cores, TCM memory size, CAN-FD, industrial communication subsystem, and other features.

You can find more technical details and links to individual parts in the 252-page datasheet.

AM64x Evaluation Boards

As introduced earlier, TI offers two development platforms: a starter kit and an evaluation board with more features and interfaces. Next, let's take a quick look.

AM64x Starter Kit (SK-AM64x)

The AM64x mainboard features the 7-core AM64x processor (specifically, it should be the AM6442), 2GB LPDDR2, 16MB OSPI, a microSD card slot, a dual-band Wi-Fi*Bluetooth 5.1 module (WiLink 8 WL1837MOD), two RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet ports, a USB 3.1 port, a micro USB port for serial communication (3x UART), a JTAG emulator, a 40-pin Raspberry Pi expansion header, as well as PRU, real-time I/O, and TI-MCU headers.

AM64x GP EVM Development Platform (TMDS64GPEVM)

This evaluation kit also shares many of the same features, such as a 16GB eMMC flash, three RJ45 100/1000M Ethernet ports, a 1-inch display, a 4-lane PCIe connector, an FSI interface for connecting C2000 MCUs, on-board measurement capabilities, and more. However, it does not include a wireless module.

AM6442 Evaluation Kit

Both kits are supported by TI's processor SDK and come with Linux/RT Linux kernels, a Yocto filesystem, and out-of-the-box demos.

Xinmai offers AM62X+FPGA customization solutions.