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William "Chops" Westfield | 6 Sep 04:50
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[EE] Freescale Coldfire...


> Some of the Freescale ColdFire V1 (and a few V2) MCUs start to look
> interesting here even though the choices are still very limited. But
> they seem to be very competitive against PIC24/PIC32, especially
> on the higher end (Ethernet, USB, etc).
>
>
>> From the product summary brocure:
>>
> 10k SRP of MCF51QE32/64/128 is US$1.94/3.30/3.80. LQFP64
> 10k SPR of MCF51JM128 is US$3.65 with 44LQFP option.
>
>

Wow.  I had no idea that the Coldfire CPUs had crept so far down in  
price!
That's ... REALLY interesting (IMO) and worth thinking about vs the  
ARM and
MIPS cored "large" MCUs.

     The only Hitachi/Freescale parts I've ever used have been the  
HC11 and
     H8S, so I'm not really up to speed on them. Do the Coldfire  
devices have
     any significant advantages over ARM based ones?

Note that "Renesas" has the CPUs that used to be Hitachi (and  
mitsubishi).
"Freescale" has the CPUs that used to be Motorola.  Coldfire is  
essentially
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Xiaofan Chen | 6 Sep 08:14

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 10:52 AM, William Chops Westfield
<billw <at> cisco.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Some of the Freescale ColdFire V1 (and a few V2) MCUs start to look
>> interesting here even though the choices are still very limited. But
>> they seem to be very competitive against PIC24/PIC32, especially
>> on the higher end (Ethernet, USB, etc).
>>
>>
>>> From the product summary brocure:
>>>
>> 10k SRP of MCF51QE32/64/128 is US$1.94/3.30/3.80. LQFP64
>> 10k SPR of MCF51JM128 is US$3.65 with 44LQFP option.
>>
>>
>
> Wow.  I had no idea that the Coldfire CPUs had crept so far down in
> price! That's ... REALLY interesting (IMO) and worth thinking about
> vs the ARM and MIPS cored "large" MCUs.

The downside is that Coldfire is only from Freescale. But so far the
only MIPS based real generic MCU is the PIC32 from Microchip.
ARM is still the king. From the website, Freescale starts to license
the Coldfire core.

> "Freescale" has the CPUs that used to be Motorola.  Coldfire is
> essentially a re-design (?) of the motorola 68000 core.  To me,
> that means two important things:
>
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William "Chops" Westfield | 6 Sep 10:28

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...


On Sep 5, 2008, at 11:14 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

>> Wow.  I had no idea that the Coldfire CPUs had crept so far down in
>> price! That's ... REALLY interesting (IMO) and worth thinking about
>> vs the ARM and MIPS cored "large" MCUs.
>
> The downside is that Coldfire is only from Freescale. But so far the
> only MIPS based real generic MCU is the PIC32 from Microchip.
> ARM is still the king.

I don't know if I consider the single-source issue a big problem when  
you start getting to 32-bit micros.  On the one hand, if you do most  
of your software in C, it ports relatively easily from one core to  
another.  On the other hand, it's not clear that having the same core  
on two microcontrollers with otherwise different peripheral sets/etc  
(as is the case with ARM) is that much of an advantage anyway.

Cisco's IOS, now a HUGE piece of software, went relatively painlessly  
from 68000 to 68020 to 68331 to 680EC30 and 68EC040, to MIPS  
(various), PPC (various), and ARM.  Somewhat more painfully to x86  
(endianness, you know.)  Compiler upgrades are more painful than CPU  
changes...

BillW

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"Ruben =?iso-8859-1?q?J=F6nsson=22?= | 6 Sep 10:27

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...


> 
> Many Coldfire chips are still big and pretty expensive. Not so sure
> about the sample policy. But it is said that Freescale is now
> pushing hard on the MCU front so maybe the situation is changed.
> 

Not sure how this relates to coldfire but I have been using HCS12 (star12) 
freescale 16 bit mcu's for a couple of years now and have never had any 
problems in acquiring samples. I am not quite happy with the code warrior 
development environment though (the code writing part), but there are 
alternaives.

/Ruben
==============================
Ruben Jönsson
AB Liros Electronic
Box 9124, 200 39 Malmö, Sweden
TEL INT +46 40142078
FAX INT +46 40947388
ruben <at> pp.sbbs.se
==============================
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Xiaofan Chen | 6 Sep 13:36

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Ruben Jönsson <ruben <at> pp.sbbs.se> wrote:
>
>>
>> Many Coldfire chips are still big and pretty expensive. Not so sure
>> about the sample policy. But it is said that Freescale is now
>> pushing hard on the MCU front so maybe the situation is changed.

Back in 1999, I was looking into 8-bit MCUs and Motorola did not
even return my inquiry (>100k per year). In the end I chose
PIC16C72A and now it is still running.

But in 2004, it seems the situations started to change and I got
some free tools and samples the HC08/HCS08.

>
> Not sure how this relates to coldfire but I have been using HCS12 (star12)
> freescale 16 bit mcu's for a couple of years now and have never had any
> problems in acquiring samples. I am not quite happy with the code warrior
> development environment though (the code writing part), but there are
> alternaives.

It seems that a lot of people complain about Codewarrior. My
colleagues are not using Codewarrior but Green Hill for 68k/ColdFire.
I know that Green Hill is expensive.

Xiaofan

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Nate Duehr | 6 Sep 20:08
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Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...


On Sep 6, 2008, at 5:36 AM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

> It seems that a lot of people complain about Codewarrior. My
> colleagues are not using Codewarrior but Green Hill for 68k/ColdFire.
> I know that Green Hill is expensive.

Mike Ahrens (Sales Engineer) at Green Hills is one of the best human  
beings I've been privileged to know.  He's also a wicked-good C coder.

--
Nate Duehr
nate <at> natetech.com

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William "Chops" Westfield | 6 Sep 20:34

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...


>> It seems that a lot of people complain about Codewarrior. My
>> colleagues are not using Codewarrior but Green Hill for 68k/ColdFire.

Has gcc really fallen so far behind that no one uses it anymore?  (or  
is it that the open source developers are so pissed off about the  
Codewarrior situation that they don't work on freescale cpus any  
more :-)

BillW

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Xiaofan Chen | 7 Sep 03:20

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 2:34 AM, William Chops Westfield <westfw <at> mac.com> wrote:
>
>>> It seems that a lot of people complain about Codewarrior. My
>>> colleagues are not using Codewarrior but Green Hill for 68k/ColdFire.
>
> Has gcc really fallen so far behind that no one uses it anymore?  (or
> is it that the open source developers are so pissed off about the
> Codewarrior situation that they don't work on freescale cpus any
> more :-)
>

Hmm, people using ucLinux and Linux tend to use gcc for Coldfire.
So it is actually quite popular.

>From the archive of the top mailing list for Coldfire, I can even say
gcc is the most popular compiler talked in the mailing list.
http://www.nabble.com/Coldfire-f2061.html

There are also quite a few companies supply IDE package based
on gcc for Coldfire.

Xiaofan
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Xiaofan Chen | 12 Sep 11:31

Re: [EE] Freescale Coldfire...

Today I played with the US$99 Demo board DEMOJM board which
comes with the 32bit ColdFire V1 MCF51JM128 and the 8-bit
9S08JM60. This demo board is quite simple (maybe similar
to PIC32 USB demo board). Both MCU has USB host/device/OTG
function and comes with the free CMX USB Lite USB stack.
CodeWarrior 6.1 is also provided (free special version,
32K for the 8-bit, 64KB for the 32bit ColdFire V1).

The debugging function is also built in the board (PEMicro
Embedded Multilink).

PEMicro actually also sells a package based on GCC.
Codesourcery provides free GCC package for Coldfire.

Xiaofan
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