Lpc2000

--- In lpc2000@yahoogroups.com, Dennis Arkeryd <arkeryd@...> wrote:

> (The atmel one that someone suggested seems to lack ethernet that is
an absolute requirement for this project.)

The Atmel SAM7X has both Ethernet and USB.

> The MCF5282 is not arm based, and it lacks usb, but none of these
are requirements in our case.

This is a powerful MCU that's been around for several years. It's a
little old by today's standards but it still competes well.

They just introduced a new one Coldfire Ethernet MCU a couple months
ago - check the Freescale website.

I've been looking at Coldfire for a while now, but I don't like the
limited popularity of these devices. Tools are also more expensive for
Coldfire because the number of developers is smaller (about $250 for a
parallel port BDM device, compared to $35 for a Arm JTAG parallel port
device, as one example).

Freescale suffers from having too many architectures and they lack a
clear focus. I do like their HC12 platform, but mostly because I've
used their 8/16 bit parts for a long time.

Freescale has several 32 bit platforms: Arm, PowerPC, Coldfire, and
some media processors and DSP's. They're also coming out with an Arm
Cortex A8 soon.

Freescale was rolled out of Motorola into a separate company due to
cash flow problems. I don't know what their future will be. I always
wanted to see them cut back on some platforms so they could focus
strongly on some of the other platforms. They have a limited budget
that's getting pulled in many directions. 

I guess the STR9 devices are supposed to be out in small quantities in
June so we'll know pretty soon how good they are. I welcome the idea
of a "tweener" chip.

Philips has some new devices coming out soon, but I don't have any
details about their timeline. I think they may have pushed back the
dates due to the flood of demand for some of their devices.

Eric