WOW, 32-bit ARM flash controller for $1.47 from Philips

It is only 8KF ( which on ARM is probably sub ~2K on 80C51 ), but the price is not the usual '2006 asymtope' price, but a 10K one, so that is impressive.

Maybe this is why the LPC952 seems to have hiccuped :)

Pin count is also good, for that price. 32 5V tolerant IO....

Dual Vcc is a minus... They could have copied the Infineon XC866, and put an On Chip regulator ? At this price/Icc level, it is VERY hard to find 1.8V regulators, that do not impact either Icc, or BOM $$$.

This will cause some deep swallowing across the industry....

It has strong communication features such as two

Jim,

agree in all but two of your statements. 8k Flash on ARM is like 2k of

In regards to the ICC of a dual voltage supply, it is probably better to have an external converter because the existing ones on microcontrollers do increase the quiescent current of the micros more than the external component. For cost reasons I would prefer the 1.8V regulator to be on-chip as well.

The real value of these 3 devices announced by Philips is the huge processing power for the money but after all, that depends on your application again.

An Schwob

Jim Granville wrote:

Look at how the XC866 handle this - they use dual regs, a tiny one for RTC and Ram-keep and another for Core operate. Result is a single device with wide supply operation, plus avoids the kludge of 5V pullups when driving MOSFETS.

Or the peripherals.. This must be closest to the cheapest uC with Dual UART - and a lot of RAM for the price too....

Other oversights : ## No sign of an OnChip CalOsc ? [ Maybe the CCO can free run, for med. precision ]

## Peripherals do not seem able to run at full CCLK, for best granularity ? It is common now to see uC with peripherals clocked FASTER than the core, so one that cannot go faster than CK/2 seems a poor resource use. Surely the Silicon can go at the CCO freq, so running the timers from that, would give fine PWM control.

-jg

Jim, now I did look at the 866 which has no power consumption listed yet. On chip voltage conversion usually results in rather miserable power down values. Comparing a 26.7 MHz 2-cycle 8-bit core to a 70 MHz (almost) single cycle 32-bit core does not seem too appropriate. If a peripheral runs half CPU clock on the ARM ist is still much faster than full speed on the XC866. The data sheet is already 7 months old and does not include values for any power consumption. The timer and analog features seem rather similar while the communication features are much better on the LPC2103. Don't know the pricing of the 8k Flash or 16k Flash but would be very surprised if the 866 with Flash is lower cost than the ARM.

IIRC the indicators for xc866 are around 1e, but typically vague on exact code size, and volumes.

I was not trying to equate the two cores, just point out that deeply shrunk uC using On Chip regulators ARE being done, and on chips that target low costs.

On the XC866, it allows them to have a 2.5V core, but still offer full

Atmel also realised the problems with dual supply uC, and their newest SAM7 variants include a 1.8V regulator.

So I was surprised Philips went back to split core, especially as they DO have LPC213x members that are single supply ? As the price drops, the external regulator becomes a larger % of the BOM.

-jg