Freescale Semiconductor recently held a customer event in South Africa, courtesy of Avnet Kopp, in order to highlight its latest 8-bit microcontroller offering, the KA2, based on the RS08 central processor unit (CPU). Freescale’s local representative, Norman Ballard was on hand to expound on the virtues of this microcontroller, which will find a ready market in ultra-low-end applications.
The KA2 comes in either 6-pin or 8-pin packaging and provides manufacturers with more flash memory than its rivals, as well as a broad range of operating voltages to meet the needs of a variety of products. Ballard says the ease of integration can help even novice designers reduce the design cycle substantially, bringing goods to market faster and allowing organisations to start recovering their costs sooner.
The RS08 core is a reduced version of the S08 CPU that has been designed for small pin-count devices with under 16 KB of memory. 30% smaller than the S08 CPU, it is more efficient and cost-effective for simple electro-mechanical devices that are migrating to solid-state electronic operation or portable devices that have evolved into smaller or even disposable versions.
The RS08 core has been streamlined by limiting the counter and address bus to 14 bits, replacing the vectored interrupt capability with a global interrupt flag register and by removing the following:
* Stack point and H:X register, along with the associated instructions and addressing modes.
* Multiply, divide and binary-coded decimal instructions.
* Arithmetic logic shift operations (logical shifts and rotates have been retained).
* Bits in condition code register and associated conditional branching instructions.
All the functions eliminated by these changes have been replaced by simpler constructs that allow compact and efficient coding of most embedded applications. In addition, to enhance efficient operation of the device, Freescale has added the following:
* A shadow program counter for more efficient subroutine calls.
* 'Short' and 'tiny' addressing modes that allow for more efficient access and manipulation of the most commonly-used variables and registers.
* A paging scheme to make good use of the direct addressing mode and the new short and tiny addressing modes.
Freescale EMEA's Martin Burns noted that while many manufacturers are opting for 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers because of the increased functionality these more advanced devices offer, the 8-bit market is certainly not vanishing. As more customers choose 32-bit products, this market is soaring ahead and creating tremendous potential for future growth (there is an average of 70 microcontrollers in a new German car today). On the other hand, new opportunities are always appearing at the low-end where 8-bit controllers are still required by companies trying to differentiate themselves from their competition, keeping this market buoyant.
The KA2 is being launched with such confidence of its acceptance, that Freescale already has 500 000 devices ready for distribution. Burns says the company is continuing its tradition of differentiating its products by meeting competitors' price points while including additional features and functionality its rivals will only have in future releases.
In closing, the company states that the RS08 core "deepens the Freescale 8-bit portfolio and it will offer a starting point for a performance roadmap that will provide pin-for-pin compatible 8-bit and 32-bit devices that share peripherals and a common set of development tools. It will allow mechanical and electronic product developers to come up with the totally unexpected - creating advanced, cost-effective electronic applications that have no precedent and disposable products with surprisingly sophisticated functionality."
For more information contact Norman Ballard, Freescale Semiconductor, +27 (0)21 554 3922, [email protected]
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