New MCUs families blooming, is this a late spring?
10
Aug
2017
It was a little longer time than usual since our last post, but just perfectly in time to catch great action at Microchip, Silicon Labs and NXP. From low to high end, they are delighting us with a full rainbow of products. Oh, and don’t forget your nice summer read on ST while you might still be on the beach or vacationing in your favorite spot. Happy summer.
Both families sport a Cortex-M4F running at 120 MHz with up to 1 MB Flash/256kB SRAM, a QSPI, SDHC, and a touch controller. The SAME51/54 add 2x CAN-FD ports, while the SAME53/54 10/100 Ethernet with IEEE1588. All include crypto-accelerators with ECC, RSA, AES, and SHA.
The SAMD5/E5 series are available starting at $2.43@10k. 26 SAMD5x parts and 32 SAME5x were released.
The SAMD51 is close to a SAM4S4B while the SAME51 looks like a SAM4S8B however with crypto and more RAM for the newly announced parts. Briefly looking at the pricing, it is interesting to see the newer parts being similarly priced to their SAM4S siblings while having more features…
On the competition front, the NXP MK22FN/X512 seems to fit the bill. The E53 will find the NXP MK64FN1M0 as well as the Infineon XMC4500F100 and Renesas RX65N. Finally, the E54 is right down the alley of the Ti Tiva TM4C129, the NXP LPC1778/4078 or MK64FX512.
Microchip also beefed up their SAMDA1 (AEC-Q100 qualified) with 12 more devices. Finally, the SAML21 got 105C parts.
No change.
No change.
Microchip enriched its PIC18 portfolio of “High Performance and Large Memory 8-bit MCUs” with 72 new parts, focusing on the K42 family specifically the PIC18F26/45/46/55/56K42 respectively carrying 64/4, 32/2, 64/4, 32/2 and 64/4 kB of Flash/RAM.
No change.
No change this month apart from the re-addition of the NUC123ZC2AN1.
It looks like the Web team has been (over-)active this month. We are noticing a much simpler URL schema where parts information is simply located at e.g. http://www.nxp.com/part/MKE14F256VLH16 vs. a 208-character long one (yes, we counted).
Product changes look heavy and we are not sure yet whether they were casualties of the web shuffle or a conscious portfolio decision.
The KE0x family is still there but there is no products accessible anymore for the KE02_40, KE04, KE06 while there is a new KE02 20 MHz that was created after we completed our indexing. As of 9/9, the KE02-20 page has both (10) 20 MHz and (3) 40 MHz parts.
Gone seem to be the R suffixes (reel packing). On a separate note, it is interesting to see that NXP has shifted from 10k to unit price for the EA Series (Automotive). Absolute prices have hence increased.
NXP also announced the LPC84x, and “introduces breakthrough innovation”. The trick is based on so-called fast access initialization memory (FAIM) “that allows the clocks of the LPC84x microcontroller to be started in a low frequency mode, keeping startup current consumption to a minimum. Additionally, its I/O ports can come up immediately and in its desired configuration, eliminating any potential termination issues with attached devices, such as MOSFETs”. FAIM aside, the LPC84x is a 30 MHz Cortex-M0+ MCU with 64/8 or 16 kB of Flash/RAM, and 12-bit DAC and ADC.
The segment is pretty crowded with competition coming from ST’s STM32L051/2, SiliconLabs EFM32G232, TI’s MSP430F5237, Microchip’s PIC32MM0064GPM064 roughly in the same price range. For reference, here is the roadmap presented by the end of 2016.
No significant changes this month at Renesas RX and RL78.
The fireworks continues at SLAB this month with the announcement of the new Giant Gecko GG1 Series 1. 2 parts are sampling likely from the same die with a BGA192 or QFP100 package. The GG11 shows an impressive roaster of peripherals including a low energy USB Device/Host/OTG, 2x CAN, 1x QSPI, an SD/MMC/SDIO controller, crypto-acceleration (AES, ECC, SHA), LCD controller, 2x DAC, 2x ADC, 4x comparators and a 10/100 MAC with 1588 and 802.3az support. All of this served on a Cortex-M4 @ 72MH with 2MB/512kB RAM.
The closest competitors are the XMC4700 and XMC4800 from Infineon although they do not have LCD support but run at 2x the frequency and Cypress FM4 S6E2C2 with 2 USB ports.
No news for the Wireless and EFM8 portfolios.
115 products likely got new silicon revisions moving from -GE1 to -GK7E1 or -GK7E2. Likely since Cypress is pretty mum about its product nomenclature.
ST released 105C and 125C versions of parts in the F3 and F4 families. The F429, F746 are getting single letter suffixes, maybe a sign of programmed parts, the nomenclature is unclear (xxx suffix are programmed parts). We also noticed a P suffix (with dedicated pinout for an external Switch Mode Power Supply that bypasses the internal regulator) for the L496. For these parts, power in run mode goes from 91uA/MHz to 37uA/MHz.
STM8 was quiet.
We encourage our reader to devour the thorough piece of Junko Yoshida on STMicroelectronics. It’s still summer time after all.
Texas Instruments added 3 parts in the SimpleLink portfolio, the CC2640R2F-Q1. These are the automotive-qualified versions of the CC2640R2F.
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