ARM Cortex-R Development Boards

In response to our recently announced Wall of Boards at the ARM booth at Embedded World 2016, we had an inquiry from Twitter about the availability of ARM Cortex-R development boards.

Of all the ARM processors, the Cortex-R are probably the least known. They are more performant than Cortex-M, but with provision for deterministic interrupt response, error correction and a variety of other features that match them to the specific constraints of hard real-time systems. In application terms, this means they find their way into deeply embedded devices like cellular modems, hard drive disk controllers, automotive braking systems and the like.

These applications means that Cortex-R development boards are not always as easy to come by, but I talked to some of our in-house experts (I'm talking about you, jont) to compile this short list. Hopefully it is of some use to any hard-realtime engineers out there. This is by no means exhaustive, and if you know of any others, feel free to add to the comments!

Cortex-R Development Boards

• Texas Instruments Hercules RM48 (ARM Cortex-R4)
• RM48 HDK Kit - Texas Instruments Wiki
• RM48 USB Kit - Texas Instruments Wiki
• Texas Instruments Hercules RM57 (ARM Cortex-R5)
• Hercules RM57Lx Development Kit - TMDXRM57LHDK - TI Tool Folder
• Cypress Traveo has Cortex-R5 in a couple of guises (some with FP, others without, similarly for dual-core).
• Spansions Traveo Family of 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 Core based Microcontrollers
• Renesas RZ-T1 has Cortex-R4
• Renesas Starter Kit+ for RZ/T1 | Renesas Electronics
• RZ/T1 | Renesas Electronics
• The Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ has Cortex-R5 showing its value as a real-time companion device to a quad-core Cortex-A53 compute cluster
• Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC although we couldn't immediately find a development board.