[ANN] Atmel invest millions of $ to please Jim Granville

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Atmel releases single clock cycle 8051 chips...

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
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Ulf Samuelsson
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ROTFL :)

[..and I nearly said something about this in my other post, this morning.. !]

-jg

But yes, I am pleased to see something that has been talked about for years, take a very good first step.

Reply to
Jim Granville

Hello Ulf,

Nice parts. It says in the announcement that there is a 10bit ADC but in the LP2052/4052 datasheet there is only the comparator. If this refers to future devices, what would they cost?

From a power consumption point of view it looks good, although not quite as good as an MSP430. What I do like is the fact that you can run it at 5V. That is pretty crucial when you have to drive FETs. That isn't so easy with the MSP series anymore.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

A more complete family road map is at

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and they have the 4 mode port pins, so you can do SW i2c, and CMOS FET ( or Piezo) drive, from the PWM mode if you wish...

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Hello Jim,

Yes, but when you check the Atmel site for the parts with ADC it draws a blank. The press release, however, said "... announced today the availability of..." and "... The AT89LP family consists of devices with

2 to 64 Kbytes of in-system programmable Flash memory, and is available in a variety of pin options, from 14, 20, 28 and 44. They include on-chip DataFlash®, 10-bit ADC,...".

To me, words like 'available' and 'consist of' means it's there. But it looks like they ain't.

Yes, OC is a wonderful thing. I believe the MSP430F2xxx series may have that, too. But those aren't out yet either.

What precludes even these low power '51 chips from many designs is their high idle power consumption, way too much for most battery based applications. You would need an external wake-up. Not that it can't be done, we actually did just that with ye olde Atmel 89C51, but it adds cost.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

Not if they were written by a French marketing assistant ...

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Ulf Samuelsson
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Reply to
Ulf Samuelsson

"Ulf Samuelsson" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:

When are these things going to be in the hands of the distys ? Price (relative to a vanilla 2051/4051) ? Pity no ADC or internal oscillator option. M

Reply to
Mike Diack

Really dont know, knew about the core, but not the imminent release.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
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Reply to
Ulf Samuelsson

The word 'family' was used, so some members have ADC, some do not - very like the P89LPC9xx series from Philips, or the Z8, etc.

Press release claims 85c/10K for 2K/20 pins and 99c/10K for 4K/20 pins, which is under existing 89C4051 prices, and under the LPC92x, but about on what I'd call the '2005 industry price curve' for uC pins/features.

uC are now cheaper than many generic alternatives :

The PCF8574 lists at $1.65/1K, so on a cents per I/O, the LP2052 looks good.

The MAX3100 is $2.79/1K, which does SPI-UART bridge operation, and a LP2052 can easily swallow that, and more..

The 14 pin and TSSOP packages make this a small solution for many 'smarter IO expansion' problems.

With a buffered SPI port, at > 5MBd, that can be chained, many devices should be easily connected in series. The LP2052 core can sustain 10MHz SPI in Master mode.

Not on the very first members, but On Chip CALOsc is a logical 'adder'

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Hello Ulf,

ROFL! But I wouldn't blame someone in France. They all play that game. After all, where is that 49 cents MSP430 device that TI says it has? AFAIK it ain't there, my distributor said that must have been for a mask part which they now discourage.

So, we all got hardened over time. Basically, if Digikey doesn't have stock or worse doesn't carry a part at all we try our utmost not to need that part in a design. Exceptions are very, very rare.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

This is a rule I follow, as well.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

I took up this rule also---after getting singed on some Maxim and Analog Devices parts. Now that DigiKey carries both those lines, one-stop shopping is easier than ever. The DigiKey website is the de-facto authority for "what parts can I get tomorrow-- and will they be there next year".

I wonder why any company in the semiconductor business would NOT want to be in the DigiKey catalog---or why some lines from a company would not appear. (I still have to get Xilinx CoolRunner CPLDS elsewhere) It's been at least 10 years since they outgrew their hobbyist origins. DigiKey is a classic distributor---they buy big lots from their suppliers, maintain inventory, and process orders for smaller lots. They concentrate on providing fast and reliable service and don't try to be salesmen for preferred lines by sending out a corps of "applications engineers".

I sometimes wonder what percentage of all the UPS and FEDEX trucks in Minnesota visit Thief River Falls each day.

Mark Borgerson

Reply to
Mark Borgerson

Probably a very small percentage, or none at all. They either have dedicated trucks that pick up from them, or they might deliver it direct to the local UPS/FDX sorting center with their own vehicles.

Reply to
larwe

Only perhaps if DigiKey has some terribly unfavorable terms in their contracts on new items, I suppose...

In any case, since Atmel's new single-cycle '51 CPUs aren't at DigiKey, I won't look much further into them that I have already. When they show up at DigiKey, I'll spend some more serious time to see if there is something worth the time.

....

By the way.... thinking about the Atmel parts makes me think of the Cygnal parts (I mean, Silicon Labs') and this makes me wonder about something else....

I've been in a business area that caters to custom customer needs and requires fairly deep involvement on their processes and isn't more of the "industrial product" areas where customer support usually isn't nearly as 'deep'. So one of the features that I've wanted to consider adding to our product lines is the ability to do in-situ diagnostics via the JTAG port. One of the problems I run up against, time and again, with these CPUs which have some form of JTAG debugging built in is that the manufacturers are loathe to disclose the JTAG debugging details. In the case of ARM7, the JTAG debugging is disclosed. But pretty much elsewhere I've looked, the answer is no.

Does anyone know of ANY microcontrollers in the 8-bit or 16-bit arena which include internal flash and ram and JTAG and where the JTAG debugging features are disclosed or else easily available through NDA (without a wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth?)

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Hello Jonathan,

All I have heard so far is that the JTAG port isn't always usable for what it was originally conceived, boundary scan. But on a uC you have a lot of options. If the circuitry around it is designed with testability in mind you can actuate outputs and then have the uC see whether the expected scenario happens.

This can require additional circuitry but if the uC has ADC features that isn't much. Say, you had an 8 bit port that pipes data to a buffer. If that buffer had a wee resistor in its VCC line and then maybe a couple resistors as a divider hooked up to that to get into the valid range you could ping one pin at a time and then check for reaction. With CMOS buffers you'd have to send a stream of ones and zeros alternating as rapidly as possible because they only consume dynamic power unless there are terminators somewhere. There will be a slight dip, prolonged by the bypass cap. Just one idea.

Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

I'm actually thinking here of some convenience in diagnosing problems at the customer site. I'd like to carry in a hand-held that I can attach to the JTAG port and set breakpoints while the device operates normally. (I cannot accept modifying the official code in any way.) If and when a certain unlikely error condition takes place I can trap at that point and then examine all of the variables. But I'd have to build a custom device for this -- Windows laptops often cannot be brought in and used with existing software.

In any case, whether or not for the above circumstance specifically, I'm still interested in microcontrollers with documented JTAG debugging.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

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