MCUs other than ARMs

I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.

I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will do
the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of course
a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30 should do the
job).

So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
required, but that is fairly obvious these days.

Are there any good MCUs that do not require support from overseas?  I
guess that is a silly question since most are supported from overseas
these days.  What company is not multinational anymore?

rickman wrote:
> I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
> need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
> in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
> and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.
> 
> I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will do
> the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of course
> a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30 should do the
> job).
> 
> So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
> AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
> power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
> required, but that is fairly obvious these days.
> 
> Are there any good MCUs that do not require support from overseas?  I
> guess that is a silly question since most are supported from overseas
> these days.  What company is not multinational anymore?

Are these master or slave SPIs ?
That's a pretty strange mix, and you main hope finding one is
going to be a vendor that includes SPI modes in their UARTs.
I've seen some dual SPIs, and some with > 3 uarts, but 3 SPIs....
Normally, this would be a CPLD solution ?

-jg

rickman wrote:

> I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
> need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
> in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
> and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.
> 
> I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will do
> the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of course
> a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30 should do the
> job).
> 
> So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
> AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
> power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
> required, but that is fairly obvious these days.
> 
> Are there any good MCUs that do not require support from overseas?  I
> guess that is a silly question since most are supported from overseas
> these days.  What company is not multinational anymore?

A quick google spits up one :  MC9S12DP256

Jim Granville wrote:
> rickman wrote:
>
> > I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
> > need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
> > in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
> > and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.
> >
> > I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will do
> > the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of course
> > a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30 should do the
> > job).
> >
> > So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
> > AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
> > power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
> > required, but that is fairly obvious these days.
> >
> > Are there any good MCUs that do not require support from overseas?  I
> > guess that is a silly question since most are supported from overseas
> > these days.  What company is not multinational anymore?
>
> A quick google spits up one :  MC9S12DP256

Just my luck, the Freescale web site is down for maintanence.  What did
you search on to find this?  Were there other hits?

rickman wrote:
>>
>>A quick google spits up one :  MC9S12DP256
> 
> 
> Just my luck, the Freescale web site is down for maintanence.  What did
> you search on to find this?  Were there other hits?

First one was
"3 SPI ports" microcontroller
which gave one hit, but I see
"3 SPI port" microcontroller
is slightly better, with 12 hits.
-jg

rickman wrote:
> I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
> need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
> in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
> and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.
>
> I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will do
> the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of course
> a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30 should do the
> job).
>
> So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
> AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
> power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
> required, but that is fairly obvious these days.
>
Don't know what processing power you require but any freescale
processor that has one or more TPU or eTPU's can provide you with all
the SPI's ports you could every want (one eTPU can be programmed to
give you up to 8 SPI ports). But don't know if you need SPI to memory
DMA, SPI chip selects, SPI speed, bi directional, etc, not enough info

steve wrote:
> rickman wrote:
> > I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
> > need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
> > in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
> > and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.
> >
> > I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will do
> > the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of course
> > a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30 should do the
> > job).
> >
> > So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
> > AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
> > power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
> > required, but that is fairly obvious these days.
> >
> Don't know what processing power you require but any freescale
> processor that has one or more TPU or eTPU's can provide you with all
> the SPI's ports you could every want (one eTPU can be programmed to
> give you up to 8 SPI ports). But don't know if you need SPI to memory
> DMA, SPI chip selects, SPI speed, bi directional, etc, not enough info

We don't need a lot of processing power.  But we do need to keep the
operating power to a minimum.  I can't access the Freescale site since
it seems to be under maintanence at the moment.  But from the other
info I can get from www.gnuarm.com, I would guess that the Freescale
ARM processors are pretty power hungry compared to the Atmel parts.

rickman wrote:

> We don't need a lot of processing power.  But we do need to keep the
> operating power to a minimum.  I can't access the Freescale site since
> it seems to be under maintanence at the moment.  But from the other
> info I can get from www.gnuarm.com, I would guess that the Freescale
> ARM processors are pretty power hungry compared to the Atmel parts.

I was thinking the 68HC16 devices

can't you just bit bang the SPI interface using the Atmel ARM chip? SPI
is a very simple interface

steve wrote:
> rickman wrote:
>
> > We don't need a lot of processing power.  But we do need to keep the
> > operating power to a minimum.  I can't access the Freescale site since
> > it seems to be under maintanence at the moment.  But from the other
> > info I can get from www.gnuarm.com, I would guess that the Freescale
> > ARM processors are pretty power hungry compared to the Atmel parts.
>
> I was thinking the 68HC16 devices
>
> can't you just bit bang the SPI interface using the Atmel ARM chip? SPI
> is a very simple interface

Politics.  Yes, I have no doubt that it could be done that way.  But we
have just about everyone in the company review designs and the janitor
seems to be a stickler for using just the right MCU for a given
application.  I think he is the guy that keeps appearing in Dilbert.

At this point we don't know a lot about what this part of the design
will have to do in software.  But whatever we assign to it, we can be
sure it will grow.  The general rule here is to provide plenty of
capacity for growth.  That is why 128 kB is on the list of
requirements.  I don't see how we would ever use more than 32 kB
considering what it is intended to do, but I am told that we will
surely end up with ten times more SW than we bargained for.

rickman wrote:
> I am very familiar with the various ARM MCU offerings.  But I have a
> need for an MCU with 3 or more SPI ports which is not so easy to find
> in an ARM.  There are a few, but they have higher power consumptions
> and that makes them poor choices for a battery powered app.
>
> I don't have hard requirements yet, but I think 128 kB of Flash will
> do the job along with 16 kB of SRAM.  I may need an I2C port and of
> course a number of I/O pins (yes, we still have to guess, but 30
> should do the job).
>

The ATmega1281 might work if you can use external SRAM.
(You can run the USART in SPI Master mode)

> So far the estimates have been done using the power figures for the
> AT91SAM7S devices which is about 100 mW.  So I prefer to keep the MCU
> power consumption no higher than that.  3.3 volt I/O operation is
> required, but that is fairly obvious these days.
>
> Are there any good MCUs that do not require support from overseas?  I
> guess that is a silly question since most are supported from overseas
> these days.  What company is not multinational anymore?


-- 
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB