Home Architectures Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M0 TI acquires Luminary Micro and joins the Cortex-M3 crowd
TI acquires Luminary Micro and joins the Cortex-M3 crowd

Texas Instruments (TI) acquires Luminary Micro and joins the Cortex-M3 crowd with the Stellaris family as a top competitor!

For all engineers thinking to switch to a Cortex-M3 from a different architecture, this is great news.

Luminary brings lots of Cortex-M3 experience with the Stellaris family while Texas Instruments contributes assets like excellent mixed signal IP and processes, great low power experience and so much more.
It is now important for TI to keep the talent acquired and to show the market how serious they are about being a big player in the mass market or how TI calls it "Catalog ARM MCUs". The advanced embedded control (AEC) business from TI gets a significant boost through this acquisition.

If there were still companies out there that did not consider Luminary to be a serious competitor, what a change now. Given the know-how of Luminary and the near endless capabilities of TI, the Cortex-M3 market just received a great gift. ARM must be really happy about this! For the competition this is a great incentive to step up their own efforts a notch.

TI and Luminary can be a match made in heaven if both are allowed to contribute with their respective strengths in the new constellation. The Luminary Stellaris LM3S9B92 that has been announced earlier this year is most definitely a top competitor already.  As it offers Ethernet, USB and CAN like the other 2 major competitors NXP LPC1768 series and STM32F107 do, it comes down to other features like pricing, long term availability, availability of advanced technology and so on. The Stellaris LM3S9B92 would have been strong as a device just being backed by Luminary but now, backed by TI it is even stronger.

This market is definitely developing in favor of the end user but it is going to be a tough fight between TI/Luminary, ST and NXP and who knows may be Toshiba and Atmel (really overdue) come up with a surprise too. Now I am wondering whether Renesas or Microchip will also enter this crazy market.

 

There is even a rather affordable FPGA prototyping system available for Cortex-M3 which will further support market coverage for future ASIC developments.