Maxim MAXQ MCU

Any URL's or PDF's ? If it's a new core, that would be brave. Anyone remember cyantechnology?

Maxim could easily follow AnalogDevices (ADuC8xx), TI (MSC12xx), Cygnal (C8051F350) into the high performance ADC+uC market, but surely it's a no-brainer to do this using their proven single clock C51 core, and their proven high end ADC experience. The MAX765x seemed a good 'first step' into the mixed signal arena.

-jg

No, I checked. The new chips are discussed at length in the Maxim Microcontroller Engineering Review Volume 3 I received in the post this morning.

There are basically two versions with the same architecture, the MAXQ10 is 8-bits and the MAQ20 is 16-bits. They both have a 16-bit instruction word and a single 'MOVE' instruction on which all the other instructions are based. A Harvard memory organisation is employed, but access to program memory is available. The stack is hardware, but a software stack can also be maintained. There is lots more stuff, but I can't be bothered to summarise it. 8-)

They also have several pages of simulated benchmarks showing how it compares with the PIC,AVR and MSP430.

Leon

--
Leon Heller, G1HSM
Email: aqzf13@dsl.pipex.com
My low-cost Philips LPC210x ARM development system:
http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller/lpc2104.html

Thanks, that's enough to find :

for the others who will be interested..

-jg

Partial information only, but they deserve a medal for courage.

Most telling text : " Simulations ? replace with MAXQ2000 post layout sim numbers " :)

Real, debugged device sampling would seem some way off. Microchip are still tinkering/pre-release on their dsPIC some 3 years after the first hoop-la.

Best looking feature : The deterministic cycle counts, and single cycle DJNZ and RET(conditional)

Not mentioned anywhere are actual MHz limits, so this may be like the

1996 AVR data book I have with 24MHz specs, that soon lurched downward as real numbers arrived from real corner silicon.

It will need to be probably > 30MHz to get on anyones' radar

Acillies Heel: Not enough info, but the fixed stack looks a problem area.

Code-Knee, or memory-reach are important comparison points, and the info given is not enough to decide that.

They have one of the strangest OPCODE descriptions I have ever seen, so it is not possible to detemine the reach-corners ( and thus at what data-sizes your code suddenly gets bigger )

Telling Omission ?: No benchmarks with 80C51, and eZ8 devices. Both these have direct memory access opcodes, and the Z8 also includes a register frame pointer. For the small data sets of embedded microcontrollers, this makes for smaller code size.

Software and emulation : ?

-jg

I noticed that they compared their architecture against PIC16 instead of PIC18 to make theirs look better.