Microcontroller packs more functionality

Cyan Technology reckons its new 16bit Flash uCOG1m microcontroller packs more functionality into its ultrasmall package than any comparable product on the market.

Cyan Technology reckons its new 16bit Flash uCOG1m microcontroller packs more functionality into its ultrasmall package than any comparable product on the market.

Each low-power device contains a full range of peripherals which can be very quickly configured using the peripheral configuration tool - part of the company's free CyanIDE integrated development environment.

The product is housed in an 8mm square, 81-pin low-profile fine-pitch ball grid array (LFBGA) package.

The uCOG1m, which is aimed at applications where space and power are at a premium, is electrically equivalent to Cyan's 128-pin packaged eCOG1k and based on a Harvard RISC core developed by Cambridge Consultants.

The chip offers an extremely low power consumption - only 400nA in standby mode (CPU stopped) and 10.1uA when continuously clocked at 16kHz.

This makes it ideal for portable and handheld devices.

Each uCOG1m also incorporates the same wide range of on-chip peripherals as Cyan's eCOG1k including a plethora of serial interfaces (dual UARTs, dual USARTs, SPI and IrDA), timers, 16bit clock generator timers, general-purpose event counter timers, an A to D convertor and extensive range of communications interfaces.

It also offers 60 digital I/O and analogue functions and 28 special GPIO pins that can be used as interrupts to wake-up the MCU meaning that the chip can be asleep for longer, therefore saving more power.

Paul Barwick, Sales Director of Cyan Technology, commented: "For many applications developers have to make compromises on their choice of microcontroller in terms of peripherals, power consumption and physical size".

"By incorporating the highest density of peripherals, memory and digital I/O per square millimetre, the ultra-low power uCOG1m addresses all of these issues".

The company's CyanIDE integrated development environment uses a patented peripheral configuration tool to reduce configuration of the peripherals from weeks to hours.

Using a simple "drag and drop" facility the designer can select the required peripherals by dragging them onto a screen image of the uCOG1m.

The chosen peripheral is then simply "right clicked" to display and set up its properties.

This process saves reading hundreds of pages of a user manual and furthermore, if a mistake is made or conflicts are generated, the user is alerted.

CyanIDE also includes a full ANSI C-compiler with no time or code restrictions as well as an editor, project file manager, simulator, debugger and in-system programmer.

CyanIDE is free and available as a download from Cyan's website or on CD-ROM.

The uCOG1m delivers high performance at a fraction of the power used by standard microcontrollers.

Using a single-instruction prefetch queue, the microcontroller boasts performance of up to 25MHz to easily accommodate the 16bit routines required by many communications applications.

With a fully configurable MMU and vectored interrupt modes, developers can have the real-time responsiveness needed for today's embedded applications.

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