MCUs have a huge 32Kbyte of RAM on-chip

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 16, 2001

Hitachi Europe has announced the immediate availability of a new series of 16bit microcontrollers featuring 32Kbyte on-chip RAM - the first in the industry to do so.

Hitachi Europe has announced the immediate availability of a new series of 16bit microcontrollers featuring 32Kbyte on-chip RAM - the first in the industry to do so.

The series includes two ROMless devices and one 384Kbyte Flash derivative, each combined with 32Kbyte fast SRAM.

The devices are part of Hitachi's leading H8S microcontroller family, offering high 16bit performance and significant on-chip memory and peripheral resources.

The series comprises of the H8S/2329F with 384Kbyte on-chip Flash (3.3V/25MHz), the ROM-less H8S/2324 (3.3V/25MHz) and the ROMless H8S/2394 (5V/20MHz).

At 25MHz these devices offer approximately 12MIPS Dhrystone, if executing from on-chip memory.

The new chips are almost pin-compatible with the existing H8S/2357F, H8S/2350 and 2532 devices, all popular ROM-less and Flash devices.

Each device in the series offers the same peripheral set.

This includes a DMA controller with four channels and a data transfer controller, which is a popular and more flexible versatile pseudo DMA.

A bus state controller divides the 16Mbyte memory space into eight areas.

A number of parameters can be programmed into each of these to allow glueless access to numerous external memories and peripherals.

A powerful six-channel 16bit timer unit (TPU) offers 16 input capture/output compare registers.

The chips also feature two 8bit timers, which provide a minimum timer functionality during periods of low activity so the TPU can be turned off to reduce power consumption.

A programmable pulse generator features 16 real-time outputs that drive new data patterns onto the pins under timer control.

This eliminates the jitter that would normally be associated with interrupt driven operation.

Three serial ports (SCI) offer asynchronous, synchronous and multimaster operation, as well as support for a subset of ISO7816-3, while an eight-channel 10bit ADC provides results within 7us (at 20MHz).

The ADC is complemented by a two channel 8bit DAC.

Other peripherals include a watchdog timer and up to 87 IO pins and eight input only pins, some of which feature schmitt trigger and open drain behaviour.

As with all H8S products, each of the new devices offer low power consumption.

This is achieved through clock gearing for the bus masters, module stop mode to turn off unused modules, sleep mode and standby mode.

The H8S/2394 is supported by Hitachi's EVB2357F evaluation board for evaluation purposes and by the E6000 emulator-kit S6P-2655, which comes with everything needed, including a C compiler.

Target probes are also available.

The H8S/2324 and H8S/2329F are supported by Hitachi's new E6000 emulator kit S6-2339 and by Lauterbach's (www.lauterbach.com) Trace32-FIRE.

The H8S/2329F and H8S/2324 are available now in QFP128 and TQFP120 packaging options.