Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector has released 10 new Flash microcontrollers. The new devices are intended to enable design engineers to take advantage of lower-cost Flash memory and realise fast, re-programmable embedded system designs using off-the-shelf microcontrollers.
The devices are based on Motorola's 16-bit HCS12 architecture, which according to the company has more than one billion US dollars in design wins secured over the next five years from global automotive customers. The HCS12 family offers customers in the communications, industrial and consumer electronics markets more choices in designing feature-laden, reliable, cost-effective embedded systems.
Two new devices, the HC9S12A256 and HC9S12A128, are included in the HCS12 family. Motorola's roadmap for the HCS12 family is designed to meet a range of performance and price requirements. It includes devices from 32 KB up to 512 KB of embedded Flash memory. Each HCS12 MCU offers 25 MHz (bus speed) performance, code efficiency, on-chip debugging capability, and code compatibility with Motorola's 68HC11 and 68HC12 architectures. This gives existing Motorola customers a logical next step to higher performance microcontrollers.
"Motorola has offered Flash MCUs since 1994 and was the first semiconductor manufacturer to ship production volumes of these types of products. The HCS12 family builds upon this success, offering a variety of derivatives with varying amounts of Flash memory and many other peripherals to give the most flexibility to our customers," said Paul Grimme, corporate vice president and general manager for Motorola's 8/16-bit Microcontroller Division. "The HCS12 Flash MCUs are also designed to give our vast existing 8-bit MCU customer base a straightforward migration path to 16-bit performance.
The HCS12 devices feature Motorola's third-generation Flash memory technology that offers very fast programming times (16 bits in up to 20 ms). Flexible block protection and security features also help guard customers' intellectual property. Additionally, the MCUs are in-circuit and in-application programmable, giving flexibility to program late in the manufacturing cycle and make upgrades remotely in the field. The HCS12 architecture is optimised for C language, and is code-efficient.
The Background Debug Mode (BDM) on HCS12 MCUs uses a single-pin interface and is engineered to enable realtime, nonintrusive, in-circuit emulation without traditional emulator limitations related to speed, voltage, capacitance or mechanical interfaces. Embedded system design engineers may emulate a system in realtime while viewing and modifying memory. This allows tuning of system performance by monitoring results and changing parameters.
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