Motorola expands MPC500 family for embedded control

Austin, Tex. - The MPC561, MPC562, MPC563, MPC564, MPC565, and MPC566 family of MCUs from Motorola incorporates embedded Flash memory and on-chip peripherals, making them well suited for a variety of avionics, robotics, manufacturing, and industrial control applications.

By Control Engineering Staff May 1, 2002

Austin, Tex. – The MPC561, MPC562, MPC563, MPC564, MPC565, and MPC566 family of MCUs from Motorola incorporates embedded Flash memory and on-chip peripherals, making them well suited for a variety of avionics, robotics, manufacturing, and industrial control applications.

“The MPC500 family has had great success in applications from helicopter controls to global positioning systems,” said Franz Fink, general manager of Motorola’s 32-Bit Embedded Controller Division. “As the long-standing leader in Flash MCUs and single-chip 32-bit embedded solutions, Motorola is committed to continual innovation while expanding this product family to help customers improve existing systems and enable completely new applications.”

“Thirty-two-bit MCUs are gaining in popularity in a number of control and performance intensive applications in the automotive, aerospace, robotics and industrial market,” said Tony Massimini, chief of technology for Semico Research Corp. “Building on its success in the automotive industry, Motorola is meeting a real market need with the MPC500 family by providing cost competitive, Flash-based 32-Bit MCUs for other demanding markets in which systems require real-time control and complex calculations.”

Each member of the family features a 32-bit RISC core, compliant with the PowerPC instruction set architecture, as well as a floating-point unit. The devices offer a variety of memory size options and I/O peripherals, including time processor units, CAN interface modules, and queued analog-to-digital converters, among others. Code compression is available on the 562, 564 and 566 devices, which extends the amount of available program space.

MPC565 and MPC566 are said to be the industry’s first MCUs to offer 1Mbyte of embedded Flash memory, which gives designers the flexibility of in-circuit and in-application programmability and re-programmability. The 1Mbyte of internal Flash is divided into 2 blocks of 512 Kbytes. Because the memory is configured into two separate blocks, program code can be executed from one block of Flash while programming into the other. With the code compression offered on the 566, up to 2 Mbytes of program code can be compressed to fit into the 1Mbyte of embedded Flash.

With its multiple on-chip time processor units (TPU), the products have the ability to coordinate many inputs and outputs from sensors, actuators, and motors simultaneously. The TPU has a dedicated micro-engine that operates independently of the CPU, thus freeing the CPU to execute other instructions. In robotics, for example, one MPC565 is capable of coordinating many motors controlling a robotic arm, which can number close to 25 in some cases. Another example is the ability of the MPC565 to control multiple functions in printing presses. One MPC565 MCU is engineered to be able to control the operation of the rollers, paper tension and ink mix as compared to alternative scenarios where more than one MCU may be needed.

The integrated Floating Point Unit (FPU) allows the devices to easily handle applications requiring complex, real-time control. The FPU maintains the precision of the results of complex mathematical calculations, making it a popular choice in advanced applications such as those described above.

A suite of hardware and software development tools is available. Development support is available from Motorola through Metrowerks as well as from leading independent tool developers providing processor probes, logic analyzers, debuggers, simulation development environments, and C and C++ compilers.

Control Engineering Daily News DeskGary A. Mintchell, senior editor gmintchell@cahners.com