Freescale Rolls Out Industrial Microcontroller Families

Saying it wants to expand its business in embeddedindustrial applications, FreescaleSemiconductor Inc. yesterday rolled out seven new families of 32-bit microcontrollersbased on the ARM Cortex-M4 processor core.

The newfamilies, which will eventually include as many as 200 separatemicrocontrollers, are targeted at such applications as motor control, smartmetering, industrial automation, appliances, home automation and portablemedical devices. Known as Kinetis,the new families of general-purpose microcontrollers were introduced to morethan 1,500 engineers and developers at the keynote speech of the FreescaleTechnology Forum (FTF) held in Orlando.

"In orderto be successful, we need to expand our business beyond automotive," said Reza Kazerounian,senior vice president and general manager of Freescale's MicrocontrollerSolutions Group. "We want to have a bigger presence in medical, energymetering, motors and drives, appliances, and general consumer and industrialapplications,"

Freescaleis currently the second biggest supplier in the $4 billion-a-year automotivemicrocontroller market. But the company wants a greater share of the $8billion-a-year general consumer and industrial MCU market, along with morepresence in the medical, appliance and energy metering markets.

Freescalesays that the Kinetis family represents "one of the most scalable portfolios oflow-power, mixed-signal ARM Cortex-M4 processor-based MCUs in the industry." Thenew devices are built using Freescale's 90-nm Thin-Film Storage (TFS) technologywith its so-called FlexMemory - configurable electrically erasableprogrammable read-only memory (EEPROM).

The firstfive Kinetis MCU families are expected to begin "alpha sampling" in the thirdquarter of 2010, with production starting during the first half of 2011. Inall, seven new Kinetis families are expected to be introduced, including 200pin-, peripheral- and software-compatible devices.

Freescaleengineers said the vision for the new families is to enable designers to choosefrom a multitude of compatible devices that could be easily applied to avariety of products.

"More and more customers want tohave one platform and then spread their software across it," said Jeff Bock,director of marketing for Freescale's industrial and multi-marketmicrocontrollers. "Kinetis allows us to provide that better than anyone."