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Philips, Atmel moves Eight-bit MCU market is heating up By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times San Jose, Calif. -- Looking for a hot market? Try 8-bit microcontrollers, now that Philips Semiconductors is joining forces with a partner to embed flash in forthcoming MCUs and Atmel Corp. is beefing up its MCU portfolio with an 8-bit device that integrates a RISC processing engine. The Philips move gives designers the ability to upgrade code either in-system or in the field. Atmel combines nonvolatile memory with a high-octane processing engine to get, the company said, a tenfold performance boost. Philips, which does not make memory products, has incorporated Flash in its MCUs by teaming with an unnamed partner, reportedly one of Taiwan's biggest suppliers of non-volatile memory. By adding Flash, the MCUs can be reprogrammed in-system or in the field to correct or upgrade the code. Philips is offering 16-kbyte and 64-kbyte versions, both with 512 bytes of RAM. Atmel seeks a giant performance leap with its AT90S1200, which includes 1 kbyte of Flash and 64 bytes of E2PROM. The device, a home-grown RISC engine with 32 8-bit general-purpose working registers, links to an arithmetic logic unit. It can execute one instruction/clock cycle. That gives better code efficiency and throughput nearing 1 million instructions/second/MHz, said Atmel.
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