Z8 dynasty expands to lower cost and power

A new family of OTP 8bit microcontrollers aims to offer significant improvements in cost and power efficiency.

Zilog has a new family of microcontrollers claimed to offer significant improvements in cost and power efficiency.

Zilog says these improvements will open up a new wave of applications that will benefit immediately from these new one-time-programmable (OTP) microcontrollers, particularly in the greater China market.

Based on its popular Z8 CISC architecture, the new ZGP323 family of products offer a comprehensive collection of OTP microcontrollers to the general purpose market which are among the lowest cost and most power efficient offering in its class.

Embedded control in applications such as general purpose, toys and handheld battery operated devices continue to demand cost-effective, 8bit solutions that offer designers flexibility in terms of memory options, pin count and, most importantly, low power consumption.

This new power efficient, low cost, Z8 GP family offers customers a broad range of memory sizes, voltage options, and package pin counts.

Zilog believes that this new product family will reduce the cost of ownership across a variety of applications including automotive, home appliances, educational toys, handheld battery powered devices, industrial control, consumer electronics, communications, lighting control, wireless switches and chimes, and other applications that require high switch, low power, cost efficient I/O devices.

"This is an exciting introduction for us since it offers our customers a best in class product that meets all their requirements", said Zilog's Ramesh Ramchandani, Senior Vice President of Marketing.

"By combining the enhanced performance, low power usage and low cost with the extended functionality and high number of compatible peripheral options that the ZGP323 provides, Zilog will open up new market opportunities for its customers, particularly in the consumer electronics and industrial control arenas".

"We see the launch of the Z8 GP family as integral to Zilog's business strategy, not only in established markets such as the Americas and Europe, but particularly in emerging markets like the greater China region and India - areas that are rapidly gearing up for greater use of consumer products".

"Our focus is to provide innovative embedded control solutions and with this latest upgrade to the Z8 we are expanding our product offering and targeting applications where power efficiency and cost are critical to the design-in decision", commented James Thorburn, Zilog CEO.

Research figures from Semico Research Corp, published in its Market Update August 2004, certainly add weight to Zilog's position.

Semico predicts that the total global value of the 8bit microcontroller market will climb from just under US $4 billion in 2002 to US $5.8 billion by 2008.

For the period 2003-2008, Semico expects the unit growth in the 8bit market to be at a compound annual growth rate of 8.1% per year.

Rapidly emerging markets, such as China, are set to play a significant role in the growth of the semiconductor and microcontroller markets, particularly in this 8bit sector.

The new Z8 GPT family comes in 4, 8, 16 and 32Kbyte memory sizes, with 20-, 28-, 40- and 48-pin varieties available.

Packages include CDIP, PDIP, SOIC and SSOP.

The ZGP323 OTP version is priced from US $0.90-1.20 per unit (depending on quantities ordered) and are immediately available for order via Zilog's network of global distributors.

The ZGP323 is launched alongside ZGR323L and ZGR163L ROM devices, making the family ideal not only for mass production but also for use in educational facilities for research and development and even by the hobbyist market.

The key advantages of the new devices are ultralow cost, a large operating voltage range (2.0-5.5V), standard, extended and automotive temperature ranges, and a rich set of features including 4-32Kbyte OTP memory, 237byte of general-purpose RAM, up to 32 GPIO and low power consumption.

The new devices offer ease of use and design because they are based on the familiar CISC architecture.

Although the Z8 GP's low power consumption and low operating voltage make it ideal for markets such as home appliances and battery operated applications, the extended and automotive temperature ranges also open the door to many different industrial applications as well.

Compared with similar chips from Philips, Microchip and Holtek, Zilog reckons the Z8 GP outperforms on price, memory size, RAM, and voltage range.

At the same time as the launch of the Z8 GP family, Zilog has reinforced its strong commitment to the design community and the 8bit market by offering two development kits for design support needs.

The first is Zilog's ZDS II integrated development environment and a windowed CDIP device - a low-cost programmer, which contains an OTP programming module; the second is a complete in-circuit emulator, which allows users to fully emulate the development environment and debug in real-time.

Additional resources available in each kit include user manuals, a quick start guide and application notes.

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