Motorola 68k platform availability

Hello,

I am currently using a 68331 CPU in a existing design and I am thinking
about it if it is really necessary to change the CPU. Possible successor
are Coldfire or ARM7. The reason why I want to stay is that I could cut
down on development time and focus on application requirements.
Reasons for upgrades are computational resources, power requirements and
price. All of them are solvable to a certain extent on the existing
platform, e.g. by algorithm tuning or simple hardware modifications. But
my biggest concerns right now are that the 68331 is quite old and that
Freescale might decide to stop its production sometime in the future.
How do you feel about that?

Kind regards,
	Christian Walter

--
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ \\\\\\ \\
email: wolti@sil.at      \ Friends don't let friends drink and su(1)
web: www.freemodbus.org  \               -- Kevin Harris

Christian Walter wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am currently using a 68331 CPU in a existing design and I am thinking
> about it if it is really necessary to change the CPU. Possible successor
> are Coldfire or ARM7. The reason why I want to stay is that I could cut
> down on development time and focus on application requirements.
> Reasons for upgrades are computational resources, power requirements and
> price. All of them are solvable to a certain extent on the existing
> platform, e.g. by algorithm tuning or simple hardware modifications. But
> my biggest concerns right now are that the 68331 is quite old and that
> Freescale might decide to stop its production sometime in the future.
> How do you feel about that?
> 
> Kind regards,
>     Christian Walter
> 

Freescale (and Motorola before that) have wanted to move people away 
from the 683xx devices, as they require old production lines to make 
them.  But they have failed so far - the 68332 in particular is still a 
very popular device.

Having said that, if you are ready to make the jump to a more modern 
cpu, then the ColdFire is your best bet.  There are dozens of variants - 
something like the MCF5208 will give you a device with a very similar 
core (from the programmer's viewpoint) and peripherals as the 68331, but 
it's around 15 - 20 times faster, supports much cheaper and larger 
memories, and costs less.