At its annual Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) corporate event, microcontroller giant Freescale announced that it's launching a broad line of 200+ ARM-based chips starting later this year. The move is a momentous one for Freescale, which has always based its midrange chips on its own in-house ColdFire technology. Now, the company's chips will be based on ARM, with ColdFire playing a supporting role.

The announcement brings Freescale in line with practically every other microcontroller and embedded-processor, which have all licensed ARM processors, it seems. The decision must have been a difficult one, but necessary in order to broaden Freescale's market appeal. ARM has undeniable momentum in the marketplace, to the point that it's almost become a de facto standard. Engineers have to explain why they're not using ARM processors. ColdFire, in contrast, appeals mainly to established (read: old) engineers who have used ColdFire (or its predecessor, the 68K) for years.

ColdFire has a very large and happy installed base. It's not going away any time soon. But the announcement of the ARM-based product line sounds suspiciously like the death knell for the much-loved ColdFire family. It seems likely that it will gradually be eclipsed by newer, faster, and better-known ARM-based equivalents.

Freescale calls its new ARM-based product line Kinetis, and all Kinetis chips are based on the Cortex-M4 processor core -- at least, for now. The company has left the door open to using other ARM processors, most likely other M-series cores. The Cortex-M3 wouldn't make any sense, as the -M4 is already a superset of the -M3. But low-end chips based on Cortex-M0 might made sense.

As if to soften the blow, Freescale also pulled the wraps off an upgrade to the ColdFire family, called ColdFire+. The plus suffix indicates a shift to more modern 90nm silicon production and the inclusion of a new nonvolatile memory technology called TFS (thin-film storage). ColdFire+ is not a processor or performance upgrade, however. In fact, the first ColdFire+ chips use one of the slower versions of the ColdFire processor core, known simply as version 1. From here on, it will be important for Freescale to differentiate its ColdFire+ chips from its new Kinetis chips; no point having two similar processors with the same performance and peripheral mix.

Freescale positions Kinetis not as a replacement for ColdFire (or its PowerPC-based chips), but as a complement. A new sibling, if you will. That's true in a lot of ways. Kinetis will appeal to developers who want ARM-based chips and software tools and who would not have considered Freescale previously. In that sense, it's accretive business. But it's also hard not to feel bad for ColdFire+, which now is positioned as the third alternative in the company's crowded three-way processor lineup.