I3C Cafe - Now Brewing: A New Digital Protocol
NXP RT500 & RT600 Crossover MCUs Enable I3C Development Today
The iMX RT Crossover Microcontrollers are an interesting beast. If you're looking for a platform that's got a ton of computational power and high-speed peripherals, but still want to avoid the complexity of running embedded linux and stick with a real-time operating system, then this crossover series is the right place to be. They've got some interesting bells and whistles, but the real reason that I'm writing about them today is due to the fact that the iMXRT500 and iMXRT600 series devices feature I3C peripherals.
Both devices are dual-core, featuring a Cortex-M33 paired with a Cadence Tensilica DSP specialized for various applications. The RT600 features a single I3C peripheral, and the RT500 has 2 x I3C peripherals. The most exciting thing from my perspective is that the eval board is readily available from Mouser, and NXP produced an awesome AppNote and sample code demonstrating the I3C functionality. The "RT600 I3C Simple Controller" Application Note and related code can be downloaded from NXP here. Note that you'll need to create an account on NXP's website in order to be able to able to access/download those resources.
We'll be documenting our experience with this board and application note in another blog post. While these devices are quite complicated if you're just looking to experiment with I3C, getting up and running wasn't actually too challenging -- it's possible to entirely ignore the existence of the Cadence Tensilica core from a development perspective while playing with I3C, which certainly simplifies the toolchain setup.
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