Big Flash and handy peripherals for 32bit MCUs

A new family of MCUs from Motorola comes complete with embedded Flash memory and sophisticated on-chip peripherals.

A new family of MCUs from Motorola comes complete with embedded Flash memory and highly sophisticated on-chip peripherals, making them well suited for a variety of avionics, 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 32bit solutions, Motorola is committed to continual innovation expanding this product family to help customers improve existing systems and enable completely new applications".

"32bit 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 32bit MCUs for other demanding markets in which systems require real-time control and complex calculations".

Each member of the growing MPC500 family features a 32bit RISC core, compliant with the PowerPC instruction set, as well as a floating-point unit.

The MPC500 devices offer a variety of memory size options and I/O peripherals, such as time processor units, CAN interface modules and queued ADCs, among others.

Code compression is available on the 562, 564 and 566 which extends the amount of available program space by allowing program code to be compressed by as much as 50%.

The flagship devices of the MPC500 family, the MPC565 and MPC566, are 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 reprogrammability.

The 1Mbyte of internal Flash is divided into two blocks of 512Kbyte.

Because the memory is configured into two separate blocks, programming code can be run from one block of Flash while programming into the other.

With the code compression offered on the 566, up to 2Mbyte of program code can be compressed to fit into the 1Mbyte of embedded Flash.

With multiple on-chip time processor units (TPU), the MPC500 family has the ability to co-ordinate 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 co-ordinating 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.

In addition to the industrial control applications described above, the MPC500 family is also used in a variety of Global Positioning Systems (GPS), ranging from high-velocity, fast acceleration aircraft applications to low-speed, high precision agriculture applications.

In avionics, the MPC500 family is a popular choice for demanding aircraft applications that must process navigation data signals transmitted from satellites, as well as receive and produce differential GPS corrections.

In agriculture, the MPC500 family is emerging as the embedded intelligence behind various precision-farming applications.

Also called site-specific management, precision farming is the practice of tailoring crop and soil management to meet the conditions at specified locations on the field.

The MPC500 devices are used in these GPS applications to map the field and deliver precise applications of fertilisers, water and other nutrients to the crops.

Part of what gives the MPC500 family such broad appeal is the integrated floating point unit (FPU), which allows the MPC500 devices to easily handle applications requiring complex, real-time control.

The FPU maintains the precision of the functionality performed from the completion of these complex mathematical calculations, making it a popular choice in advanced applications such as those described above.

Additional features of the MPC500 family include: 40 or 56MHz core compliant with the PowerPC instruction set architecture; queued serial multichannel modules (QSMCM) - for UART and SPI functionality to support off-chip serial communications; two A/D convertor modules with up to 40 analogue input channels; two or three CAN modules; a modular I/O system including 22 timing channels with additional functionality such as PWM; support for real time operating systems; rigorous environmental testing, including wide temperature ranges from -40 to +125C, high humidity and sudden changes in environmental conditions; and both JTAG and background debug module.

As with all Motorola microcontroller products, a comprehensive suite of hardware and software development tools are available for the MPC500 family to help simplify and shorten customers' development cycles.

Development support is available from Motorola through Metrowerks as well as leading independent tool developers providing processor probes, logic analysers, debuggers, simulation development environments, C and C++ compilers and emulators.

Suggested unit list price in 10,000-piece quantities starting in 2003 for standard temperature at 40MHz ranges from $20.61 for the MPC561 to $56.00 for the MPC566.

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