<FONT COLOR="RED"><B>ESC:</B></FONT> Motorola forms microcontroller division

ESC: Motorola forms microcontroller division
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Moving to strengthen its bread-and-butter microcontroller business, Motorola Inc. has created a division that will support the MCU needs of the company's customers in the transportation and consumer industries, and in the distribution channel.

The Motorola Microcontroller Division (MMD), announced at the Embedded Systems Conference, will be under the auspices of Motorola's Transportation Systems Group, and will be headed by senior vice president C.D. Tam. Motorola's automotive customers are the biggest users of the company's 8-bit controllers, hence the decision to place MMD inside the transportation group.

The transportation group is also home to Motorola's MCore technology center, where the low-power 32-bit MCore processor core can be matched with peripheral macros using language-based design techniques.

All design, manufacturing and support activities for Motorola's various 8-bit lines, including the HC05, HC08, HC11 and HC12 devices, will be centralized in the MMD. Greg White was named general manager.

The MMD's primary goal is to revitalize Motorola's MCU product line, particularly in the 8-bit sector, where competitors such as Microchip Technology Inc. (Chandler, Ariz.) and Hitachi Ltd. have mounted a determined effort. Microchip has made a particularly strong push in the distribution channel.

Motorola has shipped nearly 3 billion HC05 and HC08 8-bit MCUs to date. Though 32-bit MCUs are growing faster in terms of revenues, Tam said 8-bit MCUs account for nearly half of Motorola's overall microcontroller revenues. MCUs represent about a $1.6 billion business for Motorola, which is the world's largest MCU vendor.

The creation of the microcontroller division is the latest chapter Motorola's ongoing reorganization of its Semiconductor Products Sector (Austin, Texas). Under sector president Hector Ruiz, the $8 billion semiconductor operation has moved to a market-driven approach. The semiconductor sector has now been organized into three major business groups, i.e., transportation, wireless, and the combined networking and computing group.

While Motorola dismantled its consumer group last summer, it has decided to keep alive the consumer group's operation that's focused on imaging and entertainment solutions. It will be headed by Ray Burgess, and will take responsibility for the 32-bit Coldfire core used by the laser printer division of Hewlett-Packard Co. and others.

Responsibility for the popular 32-bit 68000 family will remain under the network and computing group, which also manages the PowerPC design activities at the Somerset design center in Austin.

Tam said it is sensible to give central responsibility for each of the major cores to the managers of the business groups that use them most frequently.

"Going from a product to a market orientation has many great advantages, but there also are some drawbacks," Tam said. "What happens when we want to move from a 0.65-micron process to half-micron? Someone has to manage that transition. Same thing with our distribution support. We call these changes a 'structural modification' to our market-driven focus."

Motorola's technology exchange agreement with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will also become more important, Tam said. Future controllers from Motorola that use flash technology will be developed jointly by AMD and Motorola at the non-volatile memory technology center, in Austin.

Many of Motorola's 8-bit controllers are used for motor control, i.e., to open a car window or to control a motor in a consumer product, Tam said.

To expand its controller lineup, Motorola unveiled at ESC a general-purpose 8-bit controller with a 20-kbyte in-system-programmable flash module. The device, the 68HC908GP20, is compatible with the 68HC08 instruction set. The GP20 (GP stands for general purpose) is the first of a promised family of flash 8-bit MCUs, said Kevin Kilbane, microcontroller marketing manager of the GP20. The GP20 will sell for less than $5 in quantities up to 50,000 units, he said.

Kilbane said the GP20 will run at 32-MHz maximum frequency, and will have two separate timers for dual serial ports. An on-chip phase-locked loop is optimized to work with an on-chip 32-kHz crystal — the same type of crystal used in digital watch circuits. An on-chip wake-up circuit will make it easier to use the MCU in applications such as security systems, where the chip can sleep and wake up about once every second to keep power consumption to a minimum.

The GP20 also supports a low-voltage reset circuit. If the operating voltage from a battery drops below the control point, for example, the circuit will prevent data in the memory from being changed.

Because I/O functions are important in the 8-bit realm, the GP20 output pins can be configured for higher power. In a remote control device, for example, two pins may support the higher voltages required to send a signal to a television set.

The GP20 will be supported by an entry-level development tool suite that costs about $300, and by a more powerful set of development tools that costs several times more.

"There is a tremendous amont of intellectual property out there that has been developed, starting with the HC05 family, and the GPXX family will take advantage of that," Kilbane said.

Motorola plans to ship other members of the GP family by the second quarter of 1999. One less-expensive part will feature a smaller flash module that the GP20, and a separate device will have a larger flash module, said Phil Hopkins, a marketing manager.