Due to the rapid development of the demand for industrial automation and Internet of Things (IoT), data used during industrial manufacturing processes are becoming more and more important; manufacturers analyze data to find the key to improve efficiency, and application service providers use data to provide customers with better services. In addition to the NUC980 series introduced in the last article, Nuvoton also released the M480 microcontroller series to meet the terminal market’s needs for IoT gateways with different product positionings.

The M480 series is based on the Cortex-M4 core and provides up to 192MHz computing speed; they also support sufficient memory resources including built-in 512KB Flash and 160KB SRAM, as well as abundant peripheral interfaces that can be used for the gateway needs of different types of application scenarios, and help system vendors collect the sensing data from different endpoints and then uploads them to the cloud service for end customers to perform analysis.

The M480 series product combination is shown in Figure 1; the peripheral interfaces include 1 set of 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port, 1 set of high-speed USB OTG, 1 set of full-speed USB OTG, 2 sets of CAN 2.0B bus, 6 sets of UART, 3 sets of ISO7816/UART, 2 sets of USCI interface (can be flexibly configured to UART/SPI/I2C), 3 sets of I2C, 4 sets of SPI/I2S, 1 set of QSPI, 1 set of I2S, 1 set of EBI, 24 channels of PWM, and 16 channels of high-speed 5MSPS ADC, etc. that can be used to connect to different types of sensing equipment and devices to acquire data from IoT endpoints.

Figure 1 M4 series product portfolio. The red block section is the M480 series.

The product package combination of the M480 series is as shown in Figure 2; multiple package selections are provided including QFN33(5x5 mm2), LQFP48(7x7 mm2), LQFP64(7x7 mm2), LQFP128(14x14 mm2), and LQFP144(20x20 mm2).

Figure 2 M480 series product package portfolio

The M480 series currently supports three types of real-time operating systems in the IoT application field, including Mbed OS, Amazon FreeRTOS, and Ali OS Things, etc.; they can support related networking protocols including MQTT, HTTPS, and TLS. Corresponding cloud applications include Arm Pelion, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Alibaba Cloud, and The Things Network. Nuvoton also provides sample codes for transmitting data from the gateway to the cloud, reducing the time customers need for engineering development significantly.

Figure 3 is a schematic diagram for industrial control gateway, DTU, RTU, data collector, and SNMP card applications, etc. It collects data from UART, SPI, I2C, and CAN peripheral devices and uploads the data to cloud through wireless transmission modules connected to its interfaces including high-speed USB, full-speed USB, and SDIO, etc., or through wired networking such as Ethernet. System vendors can also provide mobile APPs for users to connect to the cloud.

The Nuvoton NuMaker-IoT-M487 development platform supports 1 Ethernet port and can support wireless networking functions such as NB-IoT and LTE-4G by connecting expansion modules. It can also implement algorithms such as AES, SHA, and ECC, etc. with the hardware random number generator and hardware encryption/decryption engine built into the M480 series to encrypt and protect the data uploaded to the cloud.