MCUs raise the bar for 8bit systems

Zilog's new high-performance eZ80Acclaim! 8bit microcontroller family features up to 256Kbyte of reprogrammable Flash memory, Ethernet MAC and TCP/IP protocols and a complete design kit.

Zilog's new high-performance eZ80Acclaim! 8bit microcontroller family features up to 256Kbyte of reprogrammable Flash memory, Ethernet MAC and TCP/IP protocols and a complete design kit.

Designed for cost-sensitive, high-performance applications, the family includes an optimised, power-efficient pipelined architecture with an upgraded Z80 core and an enhanced instruction set, and builds on the momentum generated by Zilog's Z8Encore! product family announced in November 2002.

The new three-member product family features the eZ80Acclaim! F91 microcontroller, which includes a clock speed of up to 50MHz, the ability to address 16Mbyte of address space, and perform 24bit integer arithmetic - when combined with an impressive group of on-chip peripherals, the new controller enables design engineers to create a new class of powerful 8bit applications.

"A rapidly expanding new universe of embedded applications, ranging from vending machines and security systems to point-of-sale terminals and industrial control, require maximum performance at the lowest implementation cost", said Norman Sheridan, Sr Vice President of Systems Development for Zilog.

"The eZ80Acclaim! family offers a complete hardware, software and design kit solution that allows designers to economically and efficiently perform a number of concurrent tasks at the performance level of 16bit controllers.

For example, designers can now create point-of-sale terminals that can drive a display, print receipts and connect into a network, based on our 8bit eZ80Acclaim! solution".

The new product family also offers a wide array of peripherals and 256Kbyte of Flash memory.

Designed to enable easy, direct connections to Ethernet networks and the Internet, the new device includes an on-chip eZ80 Ethernet MAC (media access controller), embedded TCP/IP, a host of other standard protocols, and a complete design kit.

"New applications for our e-Port wireless transaction processing and monitoring systems, need powerful hardware to perform a multitude of tasks, including the ability to easily connect with a host of installed networks", said Brock Kolls, Sr Vice President of R and D, USA Technologies.

"With the new family of Zilog MCUs, we can leverage highly popular and widely implemented network technologies used in such key applications such as point-of-sale and vending systems".

All three eZ80Acclaim! devices offer backward compatibility with the popular Z80 family of MCUs, allowing existing Z80 designers to quickly get up to speed on the new architecture.

At the same time new users can take advantage of the product's quick time-to-market, low system cost, and integrated connectivity to rapidly build embedded solutions.

In addition to the F91, the F92 and F93 are designed for more cost effective applications that only require 20MHz performance and a subset of the features found on the F91.

To help designers quickly develop a wide variety of embedded systems, Zilog provides full development support for the eZ80Acclaim! family, including a full function ANSI C compiler with debugger, TCP/IP stack and OS, and evaluation hardware with an Ethernet development module.

A comprehensive development board with an eZ80Acclaim! MCU plug-in module allows designers to quickly test out their designs.

The Zilog Developers Studio integrated development environment (ZDS IDE) adds an assembler, linker, debugger and simulator to simplify and accelerate software design.

Key to the F91's ability to serve in a wide variety of embedded applications is its extensive and highly integrated peripheral set.

The MCU integrates a 10/100Base-T Ethernet media access controller (EMAC) with 8Kbyte high-speed frame buffer.

It also features IrDA-compatibility via an infra-red encoder/decoder, which extends the Ethernet/Internet connections to wireless handheld devices.

In addition, the processor features two UARTs with independent baud rate generators, I2C bus with independent clock generator, and a serial peripheral interface (SPI) with independent clock rate generator.

Along with 256Kbyte of Flash program memory, the F91 adds an extra 256byte device configuration Flash memory and 8Kbyte of on-chip high-speed SRAM with access speeds of less than 20ns.

The chip also includes four counter/generators, a watchdog timer with internal RC clocking option, and a real-time clock with on-chip 32kHz oscillator as well as a PLL with an on-chip oscillator.

The eZ80 Acclaim! F91 MCU comes in a 144-pin package and the eZ80 Acclaim! F92/F93 comes in 100-pin package.

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