The DRA821 SoC is a part of the K3 Multicore SoC architecture platform. It is targeted for for automotive gateway, vehicle compute systems, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) applications. The SoC aims to meet the complex processing needs of modern embedded products.
It is designed as a low power, high performance and highly integrated device architecture, adding significant enhancement on processing power, with integrated diagnostics, functional safety and state of the art security features and coherent memory support.
Some of the main distinguished characteristics of the device are:
- 64-bit architecture with virtualization and coherent memory support, which leverages full processing capability of 64-bit
Arm®Cortex®-A72
- Integration of a general-purpose microcontroller unit (MCU) with a dual Arm® Cortex®-R5F MCU subsystem, available for general purpose use as two cores or in lockstep, intended to help customers achieve functional safety goals for their end products
- Integration of hardware features that help applications to achieve functional safety mechanisms
- Robust security architecture with sandboxed DMSC controller managing all secure configurations with high performance client-server messaging scheme between secure DMSC and all cores
- Simplified solution for power supply management, enabling lower cost system solution (on-die bias LDOs and power good comparators for minimal power sequencing requirements consistent with low cost supply design)
The device is composed of the following main subsystems, across different domains of the SoC, among others:
- One dual-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 microprocessor subsystem at up to 2.0 GHz and up to 24K DMIPS (Dhrystone Million Instructions per Second)
- Two Microcontroller Units (MCU), based on dual-core Arm Cortex-R5F processor running at up to 1.0 GHz, up to 8K as per DM DMIPS
- Two Navigator Subsystems (NAVSS) for data movement and control
- One Device Management and Security Controller (DMSC)
The device provides a rich set of peripherals such as:
- General connectivity peripherals, including:
- One 12-bit general purpose Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC)
- Ten Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) interfaces
- Two Improved Inter-Integrated Circuit (I3C) controllers
- Eleven master/slave Multichannel Serial Peripheral Interfaces (MCSPI)
- Twelve configurable Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) interfaces
- Ten General-Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) modules
- High-speed interfaces, including:
- Two Gigabit Ethernet Switch (CPSW) modules
- One Dual-Role-Device (DRD) Universal Serial Bus Subsystem (USBSS) with integrated PHY
- One Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe) Gen3 subsystem
- One 4-Lane Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes)
- Flash memory interfaces, including:
- One Octal SPI (OSPI) or one
HyperBus™
- One General Purpose Memory Controller (GPMC) with Error Location Module (ELM) and 8- or 16- bit-wide data bus width (supports parallel NOR or NAND FLASH devices)
- Two Multimedia Card/Secure Digital (MMCSD) controllers
- One Universal Flash Storage (UFS) interface
- Industrial and control interfaces, including:
- Twenty Controller Area Network (MCAN) interfaces with flexible data rate support
- Three Enhanced Capture (ECAP) modules
- Six Enhanced Pulse-Width Modulation (EPWM) subsystems
- Three Enhanced Quadrature Encoder Pulse (EQEP) modules
- Audio peripherals, including:
- One Audio Tracking Logic (ATL)
- Three Multichannel Audio Serial Port (MCASP) modules supporting up to 16 channels with independent TX/RX clock/sync domain
The device also integrates:
- Power distribution, reset controls and clock management components
- Power-management techniques for device power consumption minimization:
- Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS)
- Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS)
- Gated clocks
- Multiple voltage domains
- Independently controlled power domains for major modules
- Voltage and Temperature Management (VTM) module
- Power-on Reset Generators (PRG)
- Power Sleep Controllers (PSC)
- Optimized interconnect (CBASS) architecture to enable latency-critical real time network and IO applications
- Control modules (CTRL_MMRs) mainly associated with device top-level configurations such as:
- IO Pad and pin multiplexing configuration
- PLL control and associated High-Speed Dividers (HSDIV)
- Clock selection
- Analog function controls
- Multicore Shared Memory Controller (MSMC)
- DDR Subsystem (DDRSS) with Error Correcting Code (ECC), supporting LPDDR4
- 2KB RAM with ECC support for A72 and R5F boot vectors
- 512KB On-Chip SRAM protected by ECC
- One Global Time Counter (GTC) module
- Thirty 32-bit counter timers with compare and capture modes
- Debug and trace capabilities
The device includes different modules for functional safety requirements support:
- MCU island with Arm Cortex-R5F configured for split/lock operation
- Extended MCU (eMCU) for
safety function processing
- Safety enabled interconnect with implemented features to help with Freedom From Interference (FFI)
- Six Windowed Watchdog Timers (WWDT) to monitor processor cores
- Ten Dual-Clock Comparators (DCC) to monitor clocking sources during run-time
- Three Error Signaling Modules (ESM) to enable error monitoring
- Temperature monitoring sensors
- ECC on all critical memories
- Dedicated hardware Memory Cyclic Redundancy Check (MCRC) blocks
The device supports the following main security functionalities among others:
- Secure Boot Management
- Public Key Accelerator (PKA) for large vector math operation
- Cryptographic acceleration (AES, 3DES, MD5, SHA1, SHA2-224, 256, 512 operation)
- Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
- Secure storage support
- On-the-fly encryption and authentication support for OSPI interface
The device is partitioned into three functional domains, each containing specific processing cores and peripherals:
- Wake-up (WKUP) domain
- Microcontroller (MCU) domain
- MAIN domain (includes extended MCU)
This domain fragmentation enables the device to achieve lower power dissipation profiles by allowing the power supplies to unused domains to be completely turned off and allows efficient addressing of safety requirements.
Note: The MCU and WKUP domains are combined into a common MCU/WKUP domain in this family of devices, but for compatibility with other K3 platform SoCs, the domain naming and separation are maintained throughout this document (where applicable).