Freescale Semiconductor has announced that it is now shipping its popular S12 16-bit automotive microcontrollers (MCUs) at a rate of more than 100 million units a year.
Freescale's S12 and S12X MCU families are designed to enable scalability, hardware and software re-use, and compatibility across a broad array of automotive electronics platforms such as body, chassis and safety systems. Believed to be the most widely-adopted 16-bit architecture in the automotive market, the S12 family offers a broad range of performance and memory options (with on-chip flash scaling from 16 KB to 1 MB) and a smooth migration path to higher-performance S12X devices.
Comments Ray Cornyn, Freescale's automotive MCU operations manager: "The S12 and S12X families offer a full range of compatible, 16-bit price/performance options, providing greater flexibility for body electronics designers. As the leading supplier of automotive MCUs, we continue to evolve our portfolio to meet the market needs for zero-defect quality and support for critical automotive industry standards, such as FlexRay technology."
Freescale's S12 architecture features two integration innovations that are vital for high-performance 16-bit automotive system designs: an on-chip XGATE coprocessor and integrated FlexRay technology. The RISC-based XGATE coprocessor addresses the design challenge of achieving higher MCU performance without the cost and complexity of adding separate processors. Running at twice the speed of the main CPU and without any CPU processing overhead, this coprocessor is engineered to boost system performance by an additional 80 MIPS at peak operation.
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