Earlier this year, Motorola announced it reached a milestone with the shipment of its ten millionth DragonBall microprocessor product. The DragonBall family is Motorola's DigitalDNA solution specifically targeted for advanced information appliances and messaging applications such as the popular Palm series and Handspring Visor series of handheld computers, and Motorola's own two-way pagers. Since its debut in mid-1995, the DragonBall series has become the number one microprocessor sold in the handheld computer market segment, according to the company.
"Our goal was to give our customers a device that was small in size, affordable, had great battery life and provided Palm with a path to feature enhancements like colour," said John Cook, Director of Consumer Product Marketing for Palm. "The DragonBall has the right combination of features we need to build great products for our customers."
Industry research points to continued accelerated growth for microprocessors such as the DragonBall. IDC predicts a compound annual growth rate of 36% worldwide and 29% domestically for handheld/pocket-sized devices over the next few years. Motorola expects the Dragonball to continue its success as the microprocessor of choice for these devices, noting that the DragonBall's rich peripheral set combined with long battery life make it the ideal solution for the personal digital assistant (PDA) and other handheld computers.
"Visor has enjoyed a great level of success because it gives people an expandable feature set in a small form factor and is affordable and very easy to use," said Ed Colligan, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Handspring. "One of the reasons we can offer those qualities to our customers is the DragonBall family of processors. We congratulate Motorola on shipping its 10 millionth unit."
DragonBall family
Fully code-compatible with Motorola's legendary 68000 family of microprocessors, the 68328 series was the first to integrate a liquid crystal display (LCD) controller. The chip operates at 3,3 V and features two power-saving modes ideal for battery-powered consumer electronics. Doze and sleep modes can be activated by shutting down the phase-locked loop (PLL). Its fully static design enables individual peripherals to shut off when idle. This unique feature helps both Palm and Handspring customers get about two months of usage out of two AAA batteries.
Because the DragonBall core is completely code-compatible with other members of the 68000 families, it has access to a broad base of established realtime kernels, operating systems, languages and development tools. Additional key features making DragonBall ideal for a variety of portable applications include a realtime clock (RTC), pulse width modulator (PWM), timers, serial peripheral interface (SPI) and universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) with support for the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) standard.
Since the original's introduction, the DragonBall family has grown to include two new products:
* DragonBall 68VZ328 - Running at 33 MHz, the DragonBall VZ is designed for higher-end applications requiring higher performance. It also supports colour LCD displays without the need for any additional logic. An expanded peripheral set is also integrated on-chip.
* DragonBall 68EZ328 - The second in the series, the DragonBall EZ is the low-cost product of choice and comes in a smaller package than the original. Available in 16 and 20 MHz versions.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version