Freescale’s Controller Continuum
received another bump with the addition
of the ColdFire MCF5227x LCD family of
chips, based on the V2 core. A V3 version
is available with a compatible but different
peripheral complement, so the pinout isn’t
the same. The MCF5227x includes an LCD
controller that handles SVGA displays (800
by 600) and a resistive touchscreen that
can turn into an eight-channel,
12-bit analog-todigital
converter
(ADC). It
has 128 kbytes
of RAM with
a built-in serial
boot loader and 16
kbytes of cache. The
chip also supports off-chip SDR, DDR, and
DDR2 memory. Peripherals include a CAN
2.0B interface, USB 2.0 OTG, three serial
ports, DMA SPI, SSI, I2C, and 55 GPIO.
A version of uCLinux is available with an
evaluation board from Freescale. A copy of
CodeWarrior for ColdFire accompanies the
chip. The open-source Nano-X Windows
systems support the LCD. A range of thirdparty
software, including Swell Software’s
PEG Portable Embedded GUI, also supports
the system. Pricing starts at $7.50. The
chip comes in a 176QFP or 196 BGA package.
The evaluation board costs $499.
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