ST breaks into 8-bit micro market with fuzzy deviceSteve BushSTMicroelectronics has created a novel development environment as the centre piece of an 8-bit microprocessor platform, revealed at the Embedded Systems Show in Nuremberg last week.
Called Five, it includes a CPU core with a novel fuzzy-logic capable instruction decoder, and a visual programme development environment. The programming environment is important for the product, said ST.
"The market [for 8-bit microcontrollers] is full of competitors," said Chiri Vinci, product marketing manager for the processor. "Most have the same peripherals and performance. To break in we had to have something new and our visual programming approach is unique to the market."
For instance, said Vinci, to program a peripheral, you just click a button on the screen.
The graphical development environment, which will be available free, allows algorithms to be developed as a mixture of flow diagrams, assembler code and C.
The additional instruction decoder, which ST has dubbed the Decision Processor, provides hardware acceleration for decision-making algorithms based on ‘if... then’ rules.
This is particularly useful where soft-computing algorithms and expert knowledge are to be used for describing and developing applications, but performance requirements rule out software macros to implement calculations, said ST.
Two ranges of chips will emerge, the 2Mips ST408 has 55 instructions and the 4Mips ST508 has 50 extra instructions and up to 32kbyte of program memory. Analogue blocks including comparators, 8 and 10-bit ADCs and PWMs are available.