MCUs Arm For Automotive Challenges

Introduced as the first member of the company's advanced high-performance 16-bit microcontroller family, the MC9S12XDP512 targets a number of automotive applications, including gateway and central body control, instrumentation, door modules, and chassis nodes. Based on the company's HCS12 architecture, the S12X family offers a five-times performance hike over previous HCS12 devices while retaining backward compatibility. The family also reports a first: the XGATE module. This onboard co-processor delivers up to 80 MIPS of additional processing power to offload tasks from the main processing unit, such as basic gateway activity and peripheral-related processing. It employs a parallel architecture said to enable more deterministic handling of interrupts and to avoid conflict between core functions and interrupt processing. The MC9S12XDP512 hss 512 KB of flash, a 40-MHz S12X CPU, the module, 32 KB of RAM, 4 KB of EEPROM, and an array of I/O. Price is $12.95 each/10,000. FREESCALE SEMICONDUCTOR INC., Denver, CO. (800) 521-6274.