Dear
Reader,
welcome to this month's edition of
MicroController Pros
Corporation's Embedded News Digest, your source for microcontroller and embedded system news.
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Embedded Tool of
the Month, August 2003:
High-end emulator for Microchip PIC, offers more powerful emulation features
at a lower price than Microchip's ICE2000 emulator. Through the emulator's
modular design, you can easily upgrade it to support a new PIC derivative or
package, at the fraction of the cost of a new emulator, by simply exchanging the
POD and/or Pin adapter board. Includes full featured software package: IDE,
Debugger, Simulator and Macro Assembler.
This month's issue:
The AMBA AHB Modeling Specification is
a fully cycle-accurate representation of the AMBA AHB protocol. Designers of
complex systems will be able to use the Interface Specification to explore
detailed AMBA interconnect issues and co-validate their system models with RTL
implementations. Besides full support of the AMBA AHB protocol, the Interface
Specification includes the AHBlite protocol that is widely adopted for
high-performance bus-matrix architectures.
The AMBA AHB Cycle-Level Modeling
Specification is open and free of any charges. A is available now for download
from the ARM® website at
http://www.arm.com/armtech/AMBA. To protect the integrity of AMBA
technology, the specification is made available under a simple license agreement
broadly in line with the widely-accepted AMBA 2.0 specification licensing
agreement.
The Embedded Systems Conference San Francisco is now accepting
abstracts for the 2004 event (March 29 - April 2, 2004
Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA), including 1.5 hour, 3-hour, and full
day tutorial sessions. ESC is looking for embedded systems developers to speak
on practical development topics ranging from programming 8-bit microcontrollers
to designing Internet-enabled systems. Deadline is 8/8/03!
For more info go to:
http://cmp.iconvention.com/cmpbrandmgr/V40/index.cvn?ID=10211
Elan Microelectronics has released two Multiple Time
Programmable (MTP) microcontrollers with on-chip USB 1.1 interface. MTP
allows customers to re-program the device up to 5000 times (similar to Flash
memory).
The EM78M611/612 are 8-bit RISC microcontrollers, based on the Microchip PIC
architecture, with 6K / 2K MTP program memory, 144 / 112 RAM, 36 / 16
I/Os, 8 interrupts, 1 8-bit timer, 24 8-bit A/D channels, 4 bytes EEPROM, and
USB 1.1 interface built-in.
The new MCU, the MB91F312, is embedded with both a high-resolution On-Screen
Display Controller (OSDC) and a Universal Serial Bus (USB) host interface,
enabling customers to deliver high-resolution, high-performance home theater
systems.
Features: Clock frequency up to 40MHz (52 MIPS); 512 KBytes Flash; 24 KBytes
RAM; 168 KBytes font ROM; I2C and UART interfaces.
The high-resolution character display with wide display area -with a wide
display field of 42 characters by 16 lines and a font resolution of 24 x 32 dots
per character, even large-screen TVs can display characters in crystal-clear
resolution without needing to use enlarged font sizes. 1,792 character types are
stored in font memory
The USB host functions allow to directly connect and control peripherals,
such as a USB mouse, keyboard or printer.
Sample Price: 2900 Yen, Package: 144 pin LQFP
Microchip introduced the rfPIC Development Kit 1, providing
design engineers with an easy way to evaluate low-power radio frequency (RF)
communication links for embedded control applications based on the its
rfPIC12F675 Flash microcontroller plus UHF RF transmitter, and the rfRXD0420
receiver device.
Designed to work in tandem with the popular PICkit 1 Flash
Starter Kit, the rfPIC Development Kit 1 consists of transmitter and receiver
modules supporting the 315MHz and 433MHz frequencies. The receiver modules,
featuring the rfRXD0420 device, plug directly into the PICkit 1 development
board for demonstration and development. The modules are available separately so
designers can create several prototypes based on the same module without having
to develop an actual RF design.
Available today with 315/433 MHz Amplitude Shift Keying,
pricing is $25 for the rfPIC receiver module, $30 for the rfPIC transmitter
module, and $135 for a kit that includes two receivers, two transmitters and the
PICkit 1 Flash Starter Kit.
The new MC9S12E128 and MC9S12E64
feature: 3 V to 5 V operation and extended temperature (-40 to +125 degree
Celsius) operating range; 25 MHz bus speed with 40 nanosecond minimum
instruction cycle time; 128 Kbytes/64 Kbytes in 0.25 micron flash; Advanced
on-chip debug module with trigger and trace for faster debug; Extensive serial
communication with three asynchronous SCIs, one synchronous SPI (1), I2C, and
infrared (IRDA) communication enabled; Up to 12 pulse width modulated (PWM)
channels, 6 with fault protection for motor control or uninterruptible power
supply (UPS) applications; Highly integrated analog functions with two 8-bit
digital-to-analog converters (DAC), a 16-channel, 10-bit analog-to-digital
converter (ADC), and a low-voltage reset/interrupt; Up to 90 general-purpose
input/output options
The first four devices in the 3 volt HCS12 family are in
production and available today. Additional 3 volt HCS12 devices are planned for
introduction later in 2003. Suggested resale pricing for the first four devices
in 10,000-piece quantities is:
MC9S12E128CFU (128 KB, 80 QFP Pin Package): $8.00 (USD)
MC9S12E128CPV (128 KB, 112 LQFP Pin Package): $8.30 (USD)
MC9S12E64CFU (64 KB, 80 QFP Pin Package): $6.40 (USD)
MC9S12E64CPV (64 KB, 112 LQFP Pin Package): $6.70 (USD)
NEC Electronics announced the availability of its new 32-bit
microcontroller V850E/CG2 “CarGate-F”. Designed especially for high-end
automotive applications, it offers five Full-CAN interfaces with 128 CAN message
buffers and an on-chip floating-point unit, thus guaranteeing very high
performance even for the most demanding gateway solutions.
Gateways are required to exchange information between the
various in-car networks, for example to provide the engine temperature to the
climate control system. Today’s cars feature up to five CAN networks. The
resulting complexity of the network requires dedicated gateway microcontrollers
tailored to high-performance routing tasks.
Based on NEC Electronics’ 32-bit V850 CPU core, the new
gateway controller features 32 Kbytes of RAM and a 40-MHz clock speed.
Furthermore, CarGate-F offers two timers, six 10-bit A/D converters, three CSIs
and two LIN UARTs. The controller provides a high-speed 32-bit bus interface
with five chip selects for the connection of up to 16 Mbytes of Flash or RAM per
chip select. 8 kBytes of on-chip instruction cache secure high performance even
with external code execution.
The new H8/36024F microcontroller operates at a maximum
frequency of 20 MHz using a 3 to 5.5 V power supply. It offers a wide variety of
on-chip peripherals, as well as the three on-chip USARTs. It has a 16-bit
timer as well as an 8-bit timer, a 10-bit analog/digital converter, and a number
of high-current I/O pins. The H8/36024F is available in two Flash versions, the
H8/36024F with 32 kBytes of single supply on-chip Flash, and the H8/36022F with
16 kBytes of on-chip Flash. The device incorporates Flash memory that can be
programmed and erased with a single power supply. A number of mask variants with
mask sizes from 16-kbytes to 32-kbytes and a variety of SRAM sizes will also be
available during 2003.
The RSC-4x features an 8 bit micro-controller with DSP assist
engines, twin DMA's, 16 bit ADC with microphone pre-amp, 10 bit DAC with PWM
speaker drivers, as well as 24 configurable I/O lines including 2 comparator
inputs. A real-time clock, general purpose timer, a watch-dog timer, a zero cost
on-chip RC oscillator are also included, along with and low battery detection.
The ADC, DAC, PWM, digital filter are all customer accessible for added features
and control. The RSC-4128 offers 128KBytes of on-chip, maskable ROM, with
address space for up to 1MByte off-chip. 4Kbytes of RAM is on chip with
sufficient memory to store speaker dependent or speaker verification templates.
ROM-less versions and various memory sizes are offered throughout the RSC-4x
family.
As a speech processor, the RSC-4x offers >97% recognition
capabilities including robust performance in noisy environments and a large
vocabulary of words and phrases. The RSC-4x also provides high-quality speech
synthesis at varying data rates from 3K-64K bits per second. Included on chip is
an 8-voice MIDI-like music synthesizer that supports voice overdubbing with
music. Speech technologies include speaker independent, speaker dependent,
speaker verification, and word spotting. Core speech modeling approaches include
Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Modeling, Dynamic Time Warping, and other
proprietary statistical and non-linear techniques.
The RSC-4x is supported by a complete suite of easy-to-use
tools for both programming and speech processing. Programming tools are
available from
The MicroController & Embedded System Store
(http://microcontrollershop.com), and include assembler, C-compiler,
in-circuit emulator, and debugging/simulation tools, all designed for fast,
bug-free programming under a user-friendly integrated development environment.
Zilog announced the availability of engineering samples of its
Z8 Encore!(R) F08 (8KB Flash) and F04 (4KB Flash) microcontrollers. This new
series of Flash microcontrollers extends the Z8 Encore! family which includes
the previously released 16KB through 64KB devices.
The ZiLOG Z8 Encore! F08 and F04 devices feature 1KB of linear
register SRAM, a 9-bit UART port with integrated IrDA encoder/decoder, two
16-bit counter timers and a 5 channel 10-bit A/D converter.
The new devices are packaged in SOIC and SSOP packages with 20
or 28 pins. The Z8 Encore! Z8F08 (8KB) will sell for $2.26 to $3.04 each in
1,000s (depending on configuration). The Z8F04 (4KB) costs $1.51 to $2.21 each
in 1000s (depending on configuration).
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