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Motorola 68k platform availability

Hello,

I am currently using a 68331 CPU in a existing design and I am thinking about it if it is really necessary to change the CPU. Possible successor are Coldfire or ARM7. The reason why I want to stay is that I could cut down on development time and focus on application requirements. Reasons for upgrades are computational resources, power requirements and price. All of them are solvable to a certain extent on the existing platform, e.g. by algorithm tuning or simple hardware modifications. But my biggest concerns right now are that the 68331 is quite old and that Freescale might decide to stop its production sometime in the future. How do you feel about that?

Kind regards, Christian Walter

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Reply to
Christian Walter
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Freescale (and Motorola before that) have wanted to move people away from the 683xx devices, as they require old production lines to make them. But they have failed so far - the 68332 in particular is still a very popular device.

Having said that, if you are ready to make the jump to a more modern cpu, then the ColdFire is your best bet. There are dozens of variants - something like the MCF5208 will give you a device with a very similar core (from the programmer's viewpoint) and peripherals as the 68331, but it's around 15 - 20 times faster, supports much cheaper and larger memories, and costs less.

Reply to
David Brown

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