Microprocessors

Freescale Semiconductor is bidding to widen the adoption of ARM Cotrex-based microcontrollers in automotive designs with its latest Kinetis series of microcontrollers. Intended for body electronics applications, Freescale makes great play of speeding up the design process and claims that it will be possible to develop “initial prototypes in as little as 24 hours, and potentially reduce research and development time by two weeks or ...

Silicon Labs has updated its Simplicity Studio development ecosystem which now supports more than 240 ARM-based EFM32 microcontrollers as well as Silicon Labs’ 8051-based MCU products. The new platform also integrates an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) that supports both 32-bit and 8-bit embedded designs. The platform’s graphical hardware configuration tools automatically configure the MCU. Embedded developers can use the integrated Simplicity IDE to ...

Farnell element14 is offering Atmel’s SAMA5D3 Xplained prototyping and evaluation platform for microprocessor-based design. The board, which is based on Atmel’s SAMA5D3 ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based MPU, has Arduino shield-compatible expansion headers for customisation. With a Linux distribution and software package the board is also compatible with Android developments. Atmel has expanded its ARM Cortex M0+-based microcontroller range with entry-level, low-power devices. The SAM D21, D10 and D11 families of Cortex M0+-based ...

Freescale Semiconductor claims to offer the smallest ARM-based microcontroller. The Kinetis KL03 comes in a wafer-level chip scale package measuring 1.6 x 2.0mm. The device’s Cortex-M0+ core runs at 48MHz and powered from 1.71-3.6V voltage rails. According to Freescale, this is 15% smaller than the previous smallest ARM chip, the KL02 device. New to this Kinetis MCU is a ROM-based ...

At the same show it revealed a proprietary 32bit microcontroller, the FT900, FTDI announced an 8bit microcontroller which executes the long-established 8051 instruction set. Called FT51, it executes one instruction per clock cycle and delivers 48Mips at 48MHz. Once more for the company, connectivity and bridging is key. “The hardwired USB hub function enables cascading of sub-systems in order to ...

Glasgow-based FTDI Chip has revealed a 32bit microcontroller at Embedded World. Yielding 2.93Dmips/MHz, it is designed to work alone, or with the firm’s novel FT800 embedded video engine (EVE) – a surprise release at last years Embedded World, and expanded this year – see below. Running at up to 100MHz, “it delivers the levels of processing needed to make considerable ...

NXP Semiconductors has a new range of USB-IF certified USB microcontrollers based on the lower power ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. NXP has increased the amount of flash and SRAM in the LPC11U6x microcontrollers, which also now have a 2Msample/s ADC. This means the microcontroller is aimed at metering and data collection, wired and wireless routing. Like all LPC11Uxx MCUs, the LPC11U6x family includes a ...

Texas Instruments has introduced a human interface controller device which will support both haptics and capacitive touch on one chip. The MSP430TCH5E haptics-enabled microcontroller will allow vibrational feedback to be added to capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels on mobile devices, point of sale terminals and  industrial control panels. TI is offering a license for Immersion’s TouchSense 2200 software which includes 122 different haptics effects, including effect chaining and ...

Renesas Electronics has increased the performance of its RX processor core, with a 4.0 Coremark MHz or 2.0 DMIPS/MHz RXv2 core. The CISC microcontroller now has the DSP performance to execute complex instructions with RISC streamlining techniques developed for the CPUs of other Renesas microcontrollers. As a result CISC features such as variable-byte instructions are combined with RISC features such as general register machine, Harvard architecture, and ...

When programming a microcontroller, several aspects for the structure and flow of the software need to be considered. Software engineers nowadays are aware of critical cases to various available non-volatile memory types (PROM, EPROM, flash) and know how to handle them. For FRAM devices, several new aspects need to be considered. The article will highlight these points and show possible ...