Zilog has staked out a chunk of the 8-bit market. Now Zilog's back in the 16-bit market with its new ZNEO product line. It is still concentrating on the embedded arena, but this expansion will definitely push Zilog into new areas.
The ZNEO 16F is a 16-bit flash-based microcontroller with a 32-bit ALU, allowing it to tackle more ambitious applications (see Figure). The current single-cycle processor runs at 20 MHz. It has 128 Mbytes of zero wait state flash and 4 kbytes of on-chip SRAM.
Peripherals include a 12-bit PWM module, 4-channel DMA controller, three 6-bit timers, an SPI port, I2C port, and two UARTs. The latter supports IrDA and LIN (local interconnect network). There are 76 GPIO multiplexed pins. On-chip analog support includes a comparator and a 12-channel, 10-bit ADC.
The on-board oscillator can eliminate the need for an external crystal or clock. A separate on-chip clock supports the realtime clock.
It will be interesting to see where this chip is used and how it will address the swarm of 32-bit Arm products.
Zilog has a $99 Z16F development kit that include its IDE and C compiler.
www.zilog.com
