Cortex-M3 at 50 MHz — flash and RAM budget check
The LM3S1601-EQC50-A2 is a Texas Instruments Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3S 1000 MCU running at 50 MHz with 128 KB of on-chip Flash and 32 KB of SRAM. That 128 KB Flash is what you partition for the bootloader, the application binary, and any constant lookup tables — after the HAL and a lightweight RTOS you are left with roughly 90 KB for the application code. The 32 KB SRAM splits between stack, heap, and DMA buffers; if your ISR stack plus the main loop data exceeds that, you stall.
Sixty I/O lines in the 100-LQFP package give you enough headroom for a parallel display bus, a keypad matrix, and a few sensor interfaces. The internal oscillator saves an external crystal in cost-sensitive builds, though you trade clock accuracy for BOM simplicity.
No official successor is published. The 100-LQFP package is a common footprint; date codes and moisture sensitivity should be confirmed at quote time.