Overview of TI AM3703
The AM3703 belongs to the Sitara family of microprocessor units (MPU’s) from Texas Instruments (TI) featuring an ARM Cortex A8 core. TI is trying to catch up with other new competitor microprocessors in the market by introducing MPU’s achieving the 1 GHz speed benchmark. AM37x devices are usually known to consume more power than the others of Sitara family but the AM3703 is claimed by TI to be considerably lesser power consumer than the older ones. Despite the decrement in power consumption, the ARM core performance is not compromised comes with a performance boost of 40%.
AM3703 block diagram (Source: ti.com)
TI has targeted the AM3703 for all types of customers, big or small, especially the automobile navigation, automation and HMI (Human Machine Interface) based applications. The added advantage of lower power requirements by this microprocessor makes it also a suitable candidate for the portable or, in other words, battery-powered applications. These portable applications include handheld navigation and data terminal devices and most importantly, the smartphones.
It is identical to its sister microprocessor, the Sitara AM3715 but with the only absence of the 2D and 3D graphics accelerator that is offered by TI on the AM3715 device. A DSP (Digital Signal Processor) like that on the TI’s OMAP35xx MPU’s is absent but it is equipped with the PowerVR SGX graphics accelerator and offers a better video processing performance as compared to the OMAP3530. The AM 3703 is not just a graphics workhorse and it is equally suitable for non graphics intensive but conventional processing intensive applications like automation and medical processing.
In addition, is equipped with all the necessary connectivity options like USB OTG (On The Go) and Host capable interfaces, five serial ports, four McSPI serial ports, three I2C controllers and support for memory cards like MMC and SD. An important interface, Ethernet, is not provided but it is implementable indirectly through the available USB controllers. 188 general purpose input output (GPIO) pins are provided for interfacing customized circuitry with the AM3703 but they have been multiplexed with pins of other functions and so those functions will need to be compromised in case of GPIO usage.
Other advantages of the AM3703 include the code compatibility with either the OMAP35x and Sitara AM35x processors from TI and the pin to pin compatibility with the AM3715. This is a rather a big benefit as this compatibility introduces the scalability of this MPU. It makes easy for the application developers to quickly port an efficient code which they have already developed for an OMAP35xx series MPU. And similarly, the applications hardware developed for the more powerful AM3715 will be usable by AM3703 due to their pin compatibility. All major operating systems are supported including Linux, Windows Embedded & CE and some real time operating systems (RTOS’s).
Related Articles:
- DM3730 – additional media microprocessor belonging to the Da Vinci series of Texas Instruments
- AM3703 on TI’s website
Embedded Board 