Motorola fills 16-bit niche with hybrid controller; starter kit

Austin, TX—Motorola reported Sept 22 that its 8/16-bit microcontroller division has combined digital signal processor (DSP) and controller functionality in its new 56F8300 16-bit hybrid con-troller family.

By Control Engineering Staff September 22, 2003

Austin, TX— Motorola reported Sept 22 that its 8/16-bit microcontroller division has combined digital signal processor (DSP) and controller functionality in its new 56F8300 16-bit hybrid con-troller family. Target markets include industrial and automotive PC peripheral, and consumer. In-dustrial applications include motor control, industrial networks, CAN, Ethernet, UPS, power sup-plies, frequency inverters, protection relays, sensorless control, valve actuators, remote metering, and robotics.

Traditionally, developers would have to start with a DSP and add a microcontroller (MCU), or MCU vendors would add DPS functionality. “There’s a better way, without compromising one or the other, and that is the 56F8300 hybrid family,” says Kevin Kilbane, strategic marketing and systems manager for Motorola’s 8/16-bit microcontroller division.

In a recent meeting with Control Engineering, Kilbane reported that 56F8300 has the highest per-formance embedded flash in the market at 60 MIPS (million instructions per second); 32-bit per-formance with 16-bit code density; industry-leading safety features, such as pulse width modula-tion fault protection, system clock generator and monitoring and power supervisor, temperature sensor; flash security; and new low-cost, tiered development tools. The family also has 32-512 k bytes program flash, 4 k bytes program RAM, 8-32 k core bytes data RAM, 8-32 k bytes data flash, and 8-16 k bytes BootFlash.

56F8300 progresses naturally from Motorola’s 56F800 series (Controller Continuum), adds Kil-bane. He expects the family to introduce six products in 2003, with nine more planned for early 2004.

For a quick start, Kilbane says the 56F8300 Developer’s Starter Kit from Metrowerks includes everything to develop code immediately. This includes documentation; cables; universal power supply; parallel port connection to host PC; Joint Action Test Group (JATG) connector; CAN PHY layer; non-intrusive debug via Enhanced On-Chip Emulation (EOnCE) port; on-board MC33794 E-Field sensor; and Code Warrior with Processor Expert.

For more information about the kit, MC56F8300DSK, evaluation modules, or any of the 56F8300 Extended Temperature Series (56F8322, 56F8323, 56F8345, 56F8346, 56F8356 or 56F8357), or Code Warrior, contact Motorola’s 8/16-bit products division at https://www.motorola.com/mcu .

Control Engineering Daily News DeskMark T. Hoske, editor-in-chiefMHoske@cfemedia.com