William Wong
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ED Online ID #13208 |
August 2, 2006
The theme of this year’s 2006 Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in sunny and humid Orlando, Florida was the 8-/32-bit Controller Continuum. There is actually a lot more going on here at FTF but more on that later. The Continuum is more of a long-term plan versus product announcements.
The Continuum blends the 8-bit families such as the S08 and the new 32-bit V1 core Coldfire family into a series of processors that will share common peripherals and pin-outs. Freescale’s CodeWarrior C/C++ IDE (integrated development environment) will tie everything together. It is based on the latest 8-bit version that employs a simplified installation and improved wizards.
The idea of a range of 8- through 32-bit parts is not new. NEC announced something similar a while ago but it is Freescale’s software play that makes the difference. CodeWarrior’s experts make it a snap to target a particular chip by creating the header files for each peripheral. The processors in this series will share 8-bit peripherals allowing easier upward migration versus the 32-bit peripherals used with the Coldfire V2, V3 and V4 core-based microcontrollers.
Freescale did some research before starting this project. The results were interesting. Seems a good number of 8-bit developers have been moving to C. Somewhere around 10% of the current code being used was done using inline assembler. This low percentage means it will be relatively easy to migrate to the V1 Coldfire chips since only the assemblers differ. C should port with relatively few problems.
Don’t run out an order anything yet. The 8- and 32-bit chips will be out about Q1 of 2007. The chips will likely come out in pairs differing by only the processor core. The amount of flash will start around 128kbytes. Additional 8-bit versions will likely be available with lower amounts of flash and the 32-bit parts will have a higher percentage of RAM. Of course, the 32-bit parts will be faster even though they use less power than other Freescale 32-bit chips. Some of the V1 variants will likely wind up with Ethernet support that is currently missing from the 8-bit family.
The Continuum was just part of the news at FTF. The Best of show awards highlighted other areas including development tools and multimedia.
FTF Best Of Show The Coldfire continuum may have to wait but the Coldfire does not. National Instrument’s LabView Embedded for Coldfire was the top development tool. It was being shown with Logic Product Development’s M5329BFE Fire Engine module (see Figure 1). The package is similar to LabView Embedded for Blackfin that was released earlier this year.
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