Freescale's Flexis line
spans the company's 50-MHz 8- and
32-bit cores,
starting with the
MC9S08QE128-based S08 core and
MCF51QE128-based
ColdFire V1 core. Flexis
microcontrollers have
common peripherals
and pinouts and represent Freescale's idea of
a Controller Continuum,
enabling easy migration
between 8- and 32-bit
platforms. With Freescale's $99 Demoqe
development board from PE Micro, developers can quickly start development with
the two chips (see the figure). Chip pricing
starts at $3.
The key success for Flexis isn't just the
hardware compatibility. The unified version of Freescale's CodeWarrior development tools is critical. It allows developers
to move an application between platforms
with minimal reconfiguration. Developers
can take advantage of a common Processor Expert with Bean Wizard support
regardless of the target platform. Each
processor still has its unique assembler,
but the C/C++ compiler provides a
smooth migration path.
PE Micro
www.pemicro.com
Freescale
www.freescale.com