CAT1A is a category from Infineon that includes devices of the PSoC™, TRAVEO™ and EZ-USB™ FX3G2 families. It bridges the gap between expensive, power hungry application processors and low performance MCUs. These devices use a dual core architecture, with both microcontrollers on a single chip. CAT1A devices have an Arm^® Cortex^® M4 for high-performance tasks, and an Arm^® Cortex^® M0+ for low-power tasks.

Devices in the CAT1A family enable engineers to create innovative, next-generation IoT devices that take advantage of the merits of each core. Using the highly-customizable Peripheral Driver Library (PDL), both processors can be programmed with a single API. In addition, the two cores share a common memory space. Inter-processor communication is simplified, both by this design, and the PDL IPC driver.

For devices with hardware compatibility, the PDL API provides fully-integrated support for Bluetooth^® LE, an RTOS, capacitive sensing, a trusted execution environment, and more. In addition to the integrated peripherals, developers can leverage flexible functionality assignments with its easy-to-use, custom, software-defined peripherals.

The combination of highly-capable MCUs with an extremely flexible driver API, extensive integrated middleware, and custom software-based peripherals, enables significant opportunity for developers to create better solutions.

Enabling innovation:

• Fully-customizable hardware peripherals with a driver library provided as source code
• Software-defined peripherals to create custom analog and digital circuits within the MCU
• Industry leading capacitive-sensing, CAPSENSE™

CAT1A supports three families of devices that share the same platform:

PSoC™ 6 devices: PSoC™ 6 is an ultra-low-power architecture which features low-power design techniques that are ideal for battery powered applications. Its dual cores, and its configurable memory and peripheral protection units, allow the PSoC™ 6 MCU to deliver the highest level of protection defined by the Platform Security Architecture (PSA) from Arm^®

• Extended battery life:
  • Built on an ultra-low-power 40-nm process technology
  • Active power consumption as low as 22-uA/MHz for the Cortex^®-M4 core
  • Dual-core Arm^® Cortex^®-M architecture, optimizing for power and performance
  • Integrated high efficiency Buck converter and LDO regulator
  • Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS with PLL/FLL)
• Protection against cyber threats:
  • XIP Quad-SPI supports on-the-fly encryption
  • Integrated, hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with secure data storage
  • Dedicated security coprocessor, which eliminates the need for external SoCs or memories
  • Secure Boot capability
  • Advanced cryptographic accelerator block supports ECC, AES128, SHA1/2/3
• Flexibility in connectivity:
  • Bluetooth^® LE with 2 Mbps throughput
  • USB 2.0, with a full-speed bit rate of 12 Mbps, and both CPU and DMA modes

TRAVEO™ II-B-E devices: TRAVEO™ II Body Entry is a dual core architecture with a high-performance, high quality grade MCU platform. These devices target Industrial Drives, Robotics, Transportation (eBikes and LEVs), eV Chargers, and Heavy duty powers and construction tools applications.

• Power Efficiency:
  Devices in the TRAVEO™ family feature six power modes that enable target applications to minimize overall power consumption.
• Cutting-edge Security Features:
  TRAVEO™ II-B-E provides secure communication with excellent scalability in memory size and pin count. This is done through the introduction of HSM (Hardware Security Module), dedicated Cortex^® M0+ for secure processing, and embedded flash in dual bank mode for FOTA requirements.
• New to CAT1A, CAN Capability:
  Multiple, independent CAN FD controllers are included on each TRAVEO™ II-B-E device. Each controller supports both CAN 2.0A/B bus architectures (speeds of up to 1Mbps) and CAN Flexible Data Rate bus architectures (speeds of up to 8Mbps), which provide high-reliability communications for commercial, industrial and automotive applications.

EZ-USB™ FX3G2 devices: EZ-USB™ FX3G2 is a family of peripheral controllers targeting USB applications in camera, video and data acquisition markets. The family includes FX20, FX10 and FX5 groups which support USB speeds of 20 Gbps, 10 Gbps and 5 Gbps respectively. These devices include dual ARM^® cores and a high bandwidth subsystem which efficiently moves data between USB and a LVCMOS or LVDS parallel interface.

• Powerful processing infrastructure:
  • Dual-core Arm^® Cortex^®-M architecture, optimizing for power and performance
  • Upto 512 KB of on-chip flash memory
  • Quad-SPI interface to Serial flash with XIP support
  • Advanced cryptographic accelerator block supports ECC, AES128, SHA1/2/3
  • DMA support to move high speed data without CPU intervention
• Flexibility in connectivity:
  • Full-featured USB 3.2 ports with capability upto 20 Gbps
  • Dual-port General Programmable Interface configurable in LVCMOS and LVDS modes
  • I2S and PDM audio peripherals for HDMI capture applications
  • CAN Flexible Data Rate controllers for communications in industrial and automotive applications
  • Multiple serial peripheral blocks configurable as I2C, SPI or UART interfaces
  • Dedicated Full Speed USB port for logging and debug support