16-Bit RISC MCU Attacks DSP And LCD Chores

Dec. 16, 2004

Needing less than 250 mA/MIPS, the 16-bit MAXQ2000 microcontroller is certain to find its way into portable, low-power applications. The chip's Harvard architectural design incorporates DSP-style instructions so it can use a hardware multiplier...

William G. Wong

Developed by Maxim, the MAXQ2000 serves up 64 kbytes of flash memory and 2 kbytes of RAM. It uses a 16-level hardware stack, and three auto increment/decrement pointers segment the 16 registers. Additional peripherals include a serial peripheral interface and Maxim 1-Wire port, two serial ports, three counter/timers, an 8-bit alarm timer, a 32-bit real-time clock, and a watchdog timer. The chip also has 50 general-purpose I/O pins and a JTAG debug interface.

Pricing for the MAXQ2000 microcontroller in a 68-pin QFN starts at $2.95. Evaluation kits are available. Development tools including C compilers are provided by IAR Systems.

Maxim Integrated Productswww.maxim-ic.comIAR Systemswww.iar.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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