ARM-based MCU costs $1

Luminary Micro announced the first members of its Stellaris family of 32bit microcontrollers (MCUs) with an entry-level price of $1. The Stellaris family is said to be the first silicon implementation of the ARM Cortex-M3 processor. The first two members of the Stellaris family—the LM3S101 and LM3S102—are available now.

According to the company, MCU applications starting with the Stellaris family have access to a 20x range of instruction set compatible performance, spanning 20MHz Stellaris MCUs to gigahertz Cortex-A8 processor-based solutions from other ARM Partners.

In addition to a Stellaris MCU, the kits include Luminary Micro's development kit motherboard and daughterboard; peripheral driver library; documentation, schematics and example programs; and all cables and jumpers.

The development kit also includes full evaluation versions of software and hardware development tools from ARM, with the RealView Microcontroller Development Kit, which incorporates the Keil μVision development environment, IAR Systems and CodeSourcery (GNU).

Luminary Micro added that alpha customers are currently designing in Luminary Micro products. Full development kits, including applications software and evaluation versions of software tools are available now. Small-quantity orders of LM3S101 and LM3S102 silicon are also available now with volume production in Q3 2006.