Microcontroller selection

you can use a FPGA with a Microblaze core;

Walter;

On 2 May 2006 16:50:37 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote in comp.arch.embedded:

Take a look at the TMS320C28xx family of DSPs from TI. 32 bit hardware fixed point and 16 and 32 bit integer. The original, larger members of the family (2810, 2811, 2812) run up to 150 MHz. The newer, smaller members (280x) run up to 100 MHz.

They all have SPI, UART(s), multiple PWMs, and CAN controllers on board. Very C friendly architecture.

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How wide are the OR/AND operations - that does not sound like it mandates a 32 bit system ?

Single Chip Parts thin-out above 100MHz, due to flash speed issues. So, you may find multiple parts is a perfectly vaild solution, especially if you have to merge a LOT of IO lines. If raw speed matters, look at devices like the BlackFin from ADi, they have 300-500Mhz region devices, RAM based. and in TQFP.

-jg

How about the Renesas SH7080 family? 100+ MIPS (YMMV) at 80 MHz, UARTs, GPIO, PWMs, A/Ds. No SPI, but it does have a synchronous serial comm unit which they have an app note for using as an SPI.

~Dave~

Try this one, ST's first ARM9+FLASH ?

AT91RM9200 is running 180 Mhz.

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Ulf Samuelsson
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This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
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Thanks for all the good suggestions. I'll look into them today. One person asked why I wanted 32 or 16 bit processors. I'd even use an 8 bit one, however, I simply didn't find one with the numerous I/O and features that I need. The reduced code size is always a plus for 8 bits, but a lot of architectures negate this extra with having tons of flash, so it didn't really bother. I am currently using an 8 bit atmel, but the new design requires a lot more I/O and speed than that little guy can muster. Thanks to everyone, you guys are excellent.

I also forgot to mention they won't let me use an fpga here, unfortunately. It was my first thought as well; I've used xilinx a lot in the past.

In such situations, I use an I/O expansion bus. You'd need: - one 8-bit port that you can use bidirectionally, for data - a read/write control line (if you need to use an external bus transceiver, else ignore) - either: - as many strobes as you need, or - as many address bits as you need to decode externally, and a single strobe

This has the advantage that (given enough address lines or strobes) it can be expanded further later.

Alternatively, if you have I2C or SPI (both of which are easy enough to bitbang), and you can sacrifice some speed, you could use these as GPIO extenders.

Alternatively again, if you have an external CPU bus (I'm guessing you don't), you could memory-map the I/O.

Steve

I think the other responders have you covered from the technical side. Let me give you some advice from the execution side:

Avoid Intel parts unless you can live with absolutely no support. If you're not a big fish, Intel will ignore any and all support queries. They even limit support access to their distributors. If we had known that prior to our Intel Xscale selection, we would have selected something else.

My 2 cents, JJS

How much I/O (total, and any natural cluster sizes ) and what speed ? The bigger parts do not always give faster IO interactions.

Will they let you use a CPLD ? ;)

-jg

How about cygnal ( now silabs ) ? fast devices with up to 64 pins i/o uart,spi etc..

Since you can get 100 pin AVRs that is probably not what he is looking for.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

You really need to define your requirements better. "Lots of I/O" does not say anything. Do you need 8 bit, 16, or 32 bit I/O, or just single control lines. How many? That makes a BIG difference. The AT91RM9200 has 208 pins, quite a bit of I/O, but you can't talk to an external bus device with

32 bits. If you need that (32), you might look at the Sharp LH79524. Lots of good Philips parts too in the LPC2000 family. Depends if you want ARM7or ARM9.

You say you don't want FPGA (CPLD?), Well do you want to have to add external Flash and SDRAM chips? If not, than stay away from ARM9 parts and stick to ARM7 with built in flash and SRAM.

Just saying you want 100MHz is not a reliable indicator of speed for anything. Some 50MHz parts could have much higher speed than a 100MHz part. That is a very complex subject. The Philips LPC2000 60MHz parts run a 128 bit wide memory access to their internal flash that allows for Zero wait states at full 60MHz. That's probably faster than a 100MHz part with wait states.

There's a ton of MCUs on the market today. You need to refine your requirements in detail to select what fits your real priorities and needs.

How long does you design need to be in production? Some Semi vendors are now saying only 5-7 years on their new MCUs.

I've done two recent designs with ARM7, and I don't want to use anything but ARM now unless I really had to. There were over 1.3B ARM cpus shipped last year. They are taking over the market. I have to design for 15 year product life, and I won't touch anything but ARM now. Many proprietary CPU cores may not be around in the future. Too few in use = discontinued parts.

Chris.

You could try to search for a chip matching your needs at:

Tomas

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com escribió en el mensaje news: snipped-for-privacy@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...

Why not to use an FPGA with an embedded soft CPU core? Xilinx' Picoblaze running on a Spartan3 FPAG could serve you very well. You can get it running at very high speed and can have any level of parallelism you want. It would be rather low cost and a perfect fit for the functions you are looking for. And won't ever be discontinued!

Regards.

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------------------------------
Jaime Andrés Aranguren Cardona
jaac@sanjaac.com
SanJaaC Electronics
Soluciones en DSP
www.sanjaac.com



*** Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com ***

Do you mean the SoftCPU, or the FPGA it runs on ? There is a definite EOL cycle in FPGAs, and it bites first in the tool flows - they drop off the not-for-new-design device support, so you are 'encouraged' to change your HW on a regular cycle....

We still don't know what 'lots of GPIO' means, but appart from the OPs mention that they won't let him use a FPGA, this is a reasonable suggestion.

If his task is similar to cable testers, then a CPLD would give both very high speed IO, plus some data compression at the IO nodes, to plunge the processor operations needed.

-jg

STR9 --> 96 MHz

Is this supposed to have some meaning to anyone? See my sig. below, and especially, read the referenced URLs. Google is not usenet.

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