Freescale Semiconductor, NXP and STMicroelectronics are battling one another in the low power microcontroller market with their ARM Cortex-M series chips.
Two of the three, Freescale and NXP will be presenting technical papers on their Cortex M4 family products at the Embedded Live technical conference which takes place at Earls Court, London 19-21 October.
"The M4 has been a significant change for our group as we have always designed our own cores, but from requests from our customers we have decided to introduce this ARM family," said Jim Stuart, European marketing manager for industrial and multi-market MCUs.
Freescale will compete with existing Cortex M3 chips from companies such as NXP.
The key is having MQX real time operating system and the Code Warrior development environment from Freescale so that a code can be ported to any 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit Coldfire or ARM device, with any combination of peripherals as the low level drivers are generated in real time.
Freescale will eventually offer over 200 variants of the ARM microcontroller.
NXP's ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller is claimed to be one of the smallest MCUs, measuring 5mm square.
LPC1102 includes 32kbyte of flash and 8kbyte of RAM in a wafer level chip-scale 2.17x2.32x0.6mm package with 0.5mm pitch.
Features include a four channel 10bit ADC, one UART, one SPI interface, two 32bit timers, two 16bit timers, and one 24bit system timer.
"Serial wire debugging and programming with four breakpoints and two watchpoints are also included," said the NXP.
Eleven I/O functions double as general purpose input and output pins.
Both Freescale and NXP will be at the Embedded Live technical conference presenting their Cortex M series microcontrollers and Freescale will be discussing the use of MEMS sensors in consumer applications.
Leave a comment