MCHP gets an ARM insurance
01
Feb
2016
The balance finally tilted in favor of Microchip and against Dialog for the acquisition of fellow Atmel. Can you imagine a portfolio of close to 13,000 products? There is still lots of work before the acquisition is consumed, but we already picture the potentially rocky integration of 2 proprietary architectures – AVR and PIC – while we are confident the ARM portfolio is safe. Another interesting part to watch will be the integration of the RF front end with the MCU and digital side. Another interesting year in perspective.
There were 56 new products in the D21, C20 and C21 families. For the D21, we are looking at L variants, alas, the current datasheet doesn’t have details on the L code. In general, these are higher temperature (105 and 125C) variants of the existing D21/C20 and C21 products.
There were no changes for AVR based MCUs.
FSL is gone, long life to Kinetis and all the Freescale products under NXP!
We will now deal with the Kinetis in the NXP section.
Infineon has a mysterious change of names to their XMC4700/4800, going from a sufix of AAXUMA1 to AAXQMA1, we suspect maybe a silicon revision, but it has not been documented.
Microchip added another 73 products this month mostly in the PIC16F1777/8/9 family. It embeds a larger size flash (14 or 28kB) and runs at the same 8 MHz.
Beyond a few datasheet updates, Nuvoton had no product change this month.
There were a few changes at NXP: in the LPC Cortex-M0(+) camp, there were a few variations of existing parts with suffixes not found in the nomenclature, namely the LPC1115FET48/CP3336, LPC1114FHN33/CP3335 and LPC1115FET48/CP3336. Others were also found in the LPC11A1 and LPC11U3 but unfortunately, there was no documentation (datasheet) to refer to the part numbers.
The LPC Cortex-M4 families had the same hickups with the LPC4330FET180 taking the same suffixes.
On the high high multi-core, the LPC436x yielded 3 variations all with 1MB Flash, 154kB of RAM, 2 Cortex-M0+1 Cortex-M4 running at 204 MHz, Ethernet with IEEE 1588 support and USB with extended range temperature (+105C). Are we looking at automotive-leaning parts? The family also supports LCD displays up to XGA (1024 x 768).
Renesas released higher temperature versions of the RX210 and RX220 (+105C) while the RL78 portfolio was stable.
Silicon Labs EFM8 had a few datasheet updates. Its big brother showed off its new EFM32JG (Jade Gecko) with 8 shiny parts. While the Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M4 have proven very popular, SiLabs has decided to go with the Cortex-M3 for a 40MHz family that claims 60uA/MHz and 1.1uA stop current. The low end family has 2 UART/SPI/IrDA/I2S/LIN, 1 I2C and ample hardware crypto blocs for AES128/256, SHA-1 and SHA-2.
The EFM32PG (Peral Gecko) looks like a Jade redux, this time with a Cortex-M4. We could not find other differences. The Cortex-M4 is priced about 50c more.
Spansion was quiet this month.
ST released 9 products, mostly TR versions of existing parts. The STM32F446ZCH6 added a UFBGA package while the STM32L041/031 added a UFQFPN package.
TI was quiet this month on the MSP430, Tiva and C28.
| Sign up for our newsletter |