This is an extract from an article in the latest eTech Magazine
The general-purpose microcontroller, or MCU, is now a commodity product. Perhaps this is an overstatement. But in one sense, at least, it can be strongly supported by the growing trend in the use of processor cores that share a ‘common’ or ‘open’ architecture. Today, while there are still plenty of MCU vendors, it appears that 32-bit MCU roadmaps are increasingly based on processor cores developed by one company: ARM.
Since their invention and first production in the early 1970s, MCUs have been designed and manufactured by a large number of semiconductor companies, which have historically developed their MCU product lines primarily on their own proprietary architectures. Especially in the 8-bit market with devices such as the H8 from Renesas, the ST6/7 from STMicroelectronics, the PIC from Microchip, but also in the 32-bit market, such as the R32 and SuperH from Renesas or the Power Architecture from Freescale or C28x from Texas Instruments, to name just a few.
However, over the past ten years or so, there has been a growing trend among silicon vendors not to develop their own proprietary microprocessor cores, but to license cores and architecture from … Weiterlesen
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