NXP Semiconductors designed the LPC2468 microcontroller around a 16-bit/32-bit
ARM7TDMI-S CPU core with real-time debug interfaces that include both JTAG and
embedded trace. The LPC2468 has 512 kB of on-chip high-speed flash memory. This
flash memory includes a special 128-bit wide memory interface and accelerator
architecture that enables the CPU to execute sequential instructions from flash memory at
the maximum 72 MHz system clock rate. This feature is available only on the LPC2000
ARM microcontroller family of products. The LPC2468 can execute both 32-bit ARM and
16-bit Thumb instructions. Support for the two instruction sets means engineers can
choose to optimize their application for either performance or code size at the sub-routine
level. When the core executes instructions in Thumb state it can reduce code size by more
than 30 % with only a small loss in performance while executing instructions in ARM state
maximizes core performance.
The LPC2468 microcontroller is ideal for multipurpose communication applications. It
incorporates a 10/100 Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC), a USB full-speed
Device/Host/OTG Controller with 4 kB of endpoint RAM, four UARTs, two Controller Area
Network (CAN) channels, an SPI interface, two Synchronous Serial Ports (SSP), three I2C
interfaces, and an I2S interface. Supporting this collection of serial communications
interfaces are the following feature components; an on-chip 4 MHz internal precision
oscillator, 98 kB of total RAM consisting of 64 kB of local SRAM, 16 kB SRAM for
Ethernet, 16 kB SRAM for general purpose DMA, 2 kB of battery powered SRAM, and an
External Memory Controller (EMC). These features make this device optimally suited for
communication gateways and protocol converters. Complementing the many serial
communication controllers, versatile clocking capabilities, and memory features are
various 32-bit timers, an improved 10-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC, two PWM units, four external
interrupt pins, and up to 160 fast GPIO lines. The LPC2468 connects 64 of the GPIO pins
to the hardware based Vector Interrupt Controller (VIC) that means these external inputs
can generate edge-triggered interrupts. All of these features make the LPC2468
particularly suitable for industrial control and medical systems.