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Rich Quinnell

More MCUs Popping Up

Rich Quinnell

Activity at Embedded World and elsewhere this week has resulted in the arrival of many new options for MCU developers. Here's a quick rundown of the ones that popped up on my radar screen:

Atmel issued a dual-topic press release covering both tools and MCUs. The company has introduced its Studio 6 IDE, which now supports both the company’s ARM Cortex-M series and 8/32-bit AVR series products. This new tool will give developers all the tools they need for either product family in one place. In addition to the tool, the company announced an expansion of its SAM3 ARM COretex-M3 processor family. There are now 40 new members, providing more options for package size, peripheral mix, and memory resources.

NXP released not a new MCU, but a new development kit developed in conjunction with partner Embedded Artists. The Android Open Accessory Application development kit provides developers with a bridge to Android-based mobile devices. The kit helps simplify development of applications for interface to or control of embedded systems using an Android platform. So, you can not only create "an app for that," you can create the accessory that the app is to control. The kit also supports use of the CAN bus, Ethernet, and 802.15.4 interfaces. It even has a nifty break-away section on the kit's PCB for creating a remote CAN peripheral.

Renesas Electronics announced its new RH850 family of 32-bit MCUs for automotive applications. The new family will include features for functional safety supporting all ASIL levels. Samples won't be available until Q3 of 2012, though.

Silicon Labs has introduced a new 32-bit family, the Precision32 MCUs, designed to be developer friendly. I talk about it in my blog, MCU Strives to Simplify Design.

STMicroelectronics released a new product family targeting lower-cost applications, the STM32 F0 devices that I discuss in my blog, MCU Targets Dual Application Space.

Texas Instruments has announced its "Wolverine" platform, which it claims uses half the power of any other MCU in the industry. Based on FRAM, the devices boast a standby current of only 360 nA. TI expects to have devices sampling in June, 2012.

I thought you would like to know about these. Any comments?

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northstar
northstar
3/2/2012 2:43:58 AM
User Rank Program Manager
Wolverine
The technology used in Wolverine family seems interesting. I can't wait to see a product from this family in the market. From words to facts is a long way and the claim that will cut in half the power consumed by any other MCU seems ... incredible. Hopefully there is not about marketing only.

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MicroPower
MicroPower
3/2/2012 3:30:29 AM
User Rank Program Manager
And there are more...
These are only a few families from some well-known companies. There are many other controllers from others companies, some of them are still operating in a stealth mode, others have proprietary controllers. Since the proliferation of the ARM controllers, different variations of the ARM are increasing exponentially.

Due to our daily work, most of us (engineers) are often concentrated in working with one family of controllers at any one time. I think in a short period of time we will be getting lost before such a variety of new comers.

The situation is getting worse since EDN no longer maintained a controller directory as they did before. I did take a look at embeddedinsights.com site and I got even more confused by the way they are represented.

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Microp
Microp
3/2/2012 4:48:06 AM
User Rank Program Manager
TI's new offerings
Rich, thanks for updating the community with latest industrial products and offerings.

About TI's offering, theoretically power consumption may be half but may not be possible in practical environment and in assembly line. Waiting for a better product review through the community.

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Rich Quinnell
Rich Quinnell
3/2/2012 12:34:28 PM
User Rank Blogger
Re: And there are more...
Micropower, as you say, there are undoubtedly more. These are just some new ones that folks took the trouble to send me news releases about so I prepared this summary. It's not intended as a definitive listing, just a tidbit of news about new products I happened to hear about.

As discussed in the MCUs Too Numerous to Enumerate blog and comments, it is becoming totally impractical to maintain a list like EDN used to provide. The Wolverine release, for instance, casually mentions that there are more than 500 MSP430 microcontrollers alone.

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Rich Quinnell
Rich Quinnell
3/2/2012 12:39:17 PM
User Rank Blogger
Re: TI's new offerings
Northstar, Microp - I think the extremely low standby/sleep power numbers come from the fact that the RAM on chip is FRAM, so it needs no current at all to retain information. Other RAM types need some power to maintain data, even if the only current drain is leakage while asleep.

But you're both right. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. It will be good to know what actual field experience reveals.

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Rich Quinnell
Rich Quinnell
3/2/2012 5:02:35 PM
User Rank Blogger
And another - Microchip
My news alerts just let me know of another set of MCU family extensions that appeared at the Embedded World show, coming from Microchip. These extension include a new 8-bit family for lighting control, a 16-bit family for cost-sensitive applications, and additions to a 32-bit family that provide more memory. A full presentation on the introductions provides lots of detail.

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Rich Quinnell
Rich Quinnell
3/2/2012 5:30:41 PM
User Rank Blogger
And another - NXP
NXP has announced two new product families at Embedded World. The LPC1100XL series targets extra-low-power operation. The LPC11E00 incoroprates integrated EEPROM to eliminate some package pins and shrink the footprint. The company's press release contains the details.

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vish2207
vish2207
3/3/2012 3:04:16 AM
User Rank Program Manager
Re: TI's new offerings
Detailed analysis and comparisions for the Wolverine Platforms are available in the White Paper from TI. Worth to have a look at it.

 

http://www.ti.com/ww/en/mcu/wolverine/wolverine-whitepaper.pdf

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Rich Quinnell
Rich Quinnell
3/8/2012 12:44:08 PM
User Rank Blogger
And Another - Zilog
Zilog has released a new 8-bit MCU family, the Z8051. Here is the press release. It is based on the classic 8051 architecture that Max loves.

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ASEEMOV
ASEEMOV
3/19/2012 2:00:41 PM
User Rank Program Manager
MCU simulator support in development tools::
Hello,

Having worked on Digital Signal Processor IDDEs for a while, I was a bit disappointed to see not so great simulator support for MCUs in their development tools. In fact, I believe there are some development tools which only support running the code on a real target - No simulator at all. The DSP companies did a pretty good job on developing cycle accurate simulators and even included peripherals (such as the SPI, SPORTs etc) in their simulators. But over a period of time, the complexity of controllers and peripherals increased. And now, there are a lot of hardware accelerators coming in picture as well. I believe most companies have now stopped simulator support for the hardware accelerators, complex on-chip controllers etc but still manage good core simulators. Not sure in case of MCUs, simulators would improve in functionality and features or would they slowly fade out over time..?

 

__av

 

 

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