News

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.

Embedded systems are getting all touchy-feely. The iPhone ushered in the era of touch-sensitive user interfaces, and now everybody wants one. Nintendo’s Wii introduced most of us to MEMS accelerometers that can tell whether you’re holding it sideways or upside-down or swinging it around. Jogging shoes come with sensors that measure the length of your stride and count the number of steps you’ve taken, even calculating calories burned on the way to the next Starbuck’s.

Well, get ready to make it more interesting. Freescale is rolling out a new line of “smart” sensor chips that do more than just measure and report raw data. They take care of that “processing” part, too. The company has taken run-of-the-mill sensors and combined them with a ColdFire processor, an I²C interface, and some memory. The result is a one-chip sensor subsystem that detects stuff, filters and massages the data, acts on it, and delivers the predigested result to a host processor elsewhere in your system.

Silicon Insider's new address is:

649 Lighthouse Avenue
Pafific Grove, CA 93950

Telephone numbers stay the same.

They say good things come in threes: the Three Stooges, triple plays, the first Star Wars movies, two halves of a six-pack. Now FPGA maker Actel adds another happy trio: SmartFusion.

Actel’s triple play is a new chip that combines the three things most embedded designers need: a microprocessor, an FPGA, and analog circuitry. The company calls the conglomeration SmartFusion on the theory that it fuses three disparate features into one device.

Processors in FPGAs aren’t new, but they’re not always successful. The big FPGA companies have done it before, and every engineering undergrad has probably tried stuffing a microcontroller into an FPGA at some point. The result is usually awkward, power-hungry, slow, and expensive. Programmable logic just isn’t a good match for the resources that a processor requires.

For a silicon company, Microchip has the best brand name ever. Even your grandmother knows what a “microchip” is, even if she isn’t clear on what they do. Like Scotch tape, Xerox copiers, and Kleenex snot rags, Microchip has built-in name recognition. (Insider trivia: here in the publishing business we get letters from trademark lawyers gently reminding us not to use words like Coke, Xerox, and Kleenex as generic nouns. A weird one came from a certain agricultural firm to remind me not to call tractors “caterpillars;” does anyone really do that?)

Microchip’s biggest challenge isn’t protecting its brand name but keeping its complex product line straight. At last count, I think the company made 3.72 zillion different kinds of microcontrollers. They’ve abandoned any semblance of meaningful names or part numbers for them all; I think they just assign a serial number at birth and call it good.

It’s a floor wax! It’s a dessert topping! It’s the Cortex-M4!

As if ARM’s pantry of microprocessors weren’t already well stocked, now there’s another tasty treat to squeeze on the shelf. The Cortex-M4, revealed just yesterday, combines ingredients from the popular M3 microcontroller with a helping of goodies from the ARM9 and ARM11. The resulting confection is a microcontroller/DSP combination that should suit the tastes of embedded designers the world over.

As its name suggests, the new M4 is part of ARM’s low-end microcontroller range of 32-bit CPU cores that run the new(-ish) Thumb2 instruction set. Like other M-series processors, the M4 is intended for fairly low-cost chips in the $2–$15 range. Indeed, the first M4-based chip from NXP is due out late this year and will likely be priced right around $5 in volume.