Freescale’s Controller Continuum received another bump with the addition of the ColdFire MCF5227x LCD family of chips, based on the V2 core. A V3 version is available with a compatible but different peripheral complement, so the pinout isn’t the same. The MCF5227x includes an LCD controller that handles SVGA displays (800 by 600) and a resistive touchscreen that can turn into an eight-channel, 12-bit analog-todigital converter (ADC). It has 128 kbytes of RAM with a built-in serial boot loader and 16 kbytes of cache. The chip also supports off-chip SDR, DDR, and DDR2 memory. Peripherals include a CAN 2.0B interface, USB 2.0 OTG, three serial ports, DMA SPI, SSI, I2C, and 55 GPIO. A version of uCLinux is available with an evaluation board from Freescale. A copy of CodeWarrior for ColdFire accompanies the chip. The open-source Nano-X Windows systems support the LCD. A range of thirdparty software, including Swell Software’s PEG Portable Embedded GUI, also supports the system. Pricing starts at $7.50. The chip comes in a 176QFP or 196 BGA package. The evaluation board costs $499.
FREESCALE • www.freescale.com
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