It’s already spring!
23
Feb
2016
This was already spring time for new products that sprouted out like blue bonnets in Texas! ST fired the opening salvo low to the ground with the STM32L0x1 – a sub-dollar series – and into the sky with the STM32F7. Nuvoton put its Cortex-M4 into production while NXP and Infineon added new strings to their bow. Renesas, not to be left behind announced new motor control products and a low end RX230. If you need to make sense of all this, please contact us on twitter or just here.
There were 41 new products at Atmel in the 3N, D, E7 and S7 families. The SAM3N got new parts that can be found at the ditribution, but not on the Atmel site, namely the ATSAM3N2 and 4. These are 128/256 kB Flash variants of the N3. The D10 got a new WLCSP package (ATSAMD10D14A-UUT) while the D20 got BGA (-CN parts). The E70 added VFBGA (-CFN) and thw E70 VQFN and VFBGA (-MN and -CFN respectively).
It was also interesting to see the V70 and V71 portfolios lose the QFN options.
There were no changes for AVR-based MCUs.
Infineon modestly launched the XMC4300, a lower end Ether-cat based 144MHz Cortex-M4 family. There were only 2 part numbers released with 2 temperature grades: -40 to +85C and -40 to +125C.
Microchip was in a pruning mode this month with 14 part numbers removed, from one DSPIC33FJ to 9 PIC16F/LF parts and a few others.
Beyond a few datasheet updates, Nuvoton had all its M451/2/3 families getting into full production. Expect more competition on the Chinese market.
There were a couple dozen new parts at NXP on the LPC side. We are seeing more of these mysterious parts for the LPC18 familes, with /CP33xx suffixes as well as the launch of the LPC40xx. The latter is a 120MHz, 85C, Cortex-M4 based family with 64 or 512kB of Flash with USB FS Host/Device. Compared to the other devices in the LPC4 realm, it features a single core and lower frequency and Flash size – except for the Flashless LPC43xx.
Renesas has strenghtned its motor control portfolio with no less than 64 additional RX62T and RX63T more than doubling the previous part count. These were mostly +105C versions. It also launched the RX230 a de-featured general purpose RX231 with no USB/CAN and SD card interface for the low cost general purpose market, in all 24 parts.
On the RL78 front there were 4 new R5F11C products part of the application specific RL78/I1x family.
Silicon Labs was quiet this month
Spansion was quiet this month.
ST has a festival of new products this month with no less than 141 part numbers from the high end to the low power type. Starting with the high end, ST beefed up its Cortex-M7 portfolio with 17 new products, adding new packages to the lower en 745 and 746, creating the F7x7 and F7x9 families with JPEG codec and MIPI DSI interfaces.
On the low power high performance STM32L4, 33 products appeared to cover the lower end with lower flash densities and/or no USB connectivity.
Finally, on the ultra low end, there was a nice push with the addition or 85 products, most of which were focused on less-featured parts – no DAC, touch, segment LCD or RNG. The lowest price point on the L0 family is now set at USD 0.587/10ku for the STM32L11D3P6, a 32MHz Cortex-M0+ with 8/2/0.5kB of Flash/RAM/EEPROM and a 12-bit ADC.
TI was quiet this month on the MSP430, Tiva and C28 fronts.
MCHP gets an ARM insurance
01
Feb
2016
The balance finally tilted in favor of Microchip and against Dialog for the acquisition of fellow Atmel. Can you imagine a portfolio of close to 13,000 products? There is still lots of work before the acquisition is consumed, but we already picture the potentially rocky integration of 2 proprietary architectures – AVR and PIC – while we are confident the ARM portfolio is safe. Another interesting part to watch will be the integration of the RF front end with the MCU and digital side. Another interesting year in perspective.
There were 56 new products in the D21, C20 and C21 families. For the D21, we are looking at L variants, alas, the current datasheet doesn’t have details on the L code. In general, these are higher temperature (105 and 125C) variants of the existing D21/C20 and C21 products.
There were no changes for AVR based MCUs.
FSL is gone, long life to Kinetis and all the Freescale products under NXP!
We will now deal with the Kinetis in the NXP section.
Infineon has a mysterious change of names to their XMC4700/4800, going from a sufix of AAXUMA1 to AAXQMA1, we suspect maybe a silicon revision, but it has not been documented.
Microchip added another 73 products this month mostly in the PIC16F1777/8/9 family. It embeds a larger size flash (14 or 28kB) and runs at the same 8 MHz.
Beyond a few datasheet updates, Nuvoton had no product change this month.
There were a few changes at NXP: in the LPC Cortex-M0(+) camp, there were a few variations of existing parts with suffixes not found in the nomenclature, namely the LPC1115FET48/CP3336, LPC1114FHN33/CP3335 and LPC1115FET48/CP3336. Others were also found in the LPC11A1 and LPC11U3 but unfortunately, there was no documentation (datasheet) to refer to the part numbers.
The LPC Cortex-M4 families had the same hickups with the LPC4330FET180 taking the same suffixes.
On the high high multi-core, the LPC436x yielded 3 variations all with 1MB Flash, 154kB of RAM, 2 Cortex-M0+1 Cortex-M4 running at 204 MHz, Ethernet with IEEE 1588 support and USB with extended range temperature (+105C). Are we looking at automotive-leaning parts? The family also supports LCD displays up to XGA (1024 x 768).
Renesas released higher temperature versions of the RX210 and RX220 (+105C) while the RL78 portfolio was stable.
Silicon Labs EFM8 had a few datasheet updates. Its big brother showed off its new EFM32JG (Jade Gecko) with 8 shiny parts. While the Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M4 have proven very popular, SiLabs has decided to go with the Cortex-M3 for a 40MHz family that claims 60uA/MHz and 1.1uA stop current. The low end family has 2 UART/SPI/IrDA/I2S/LIN, 1 I2C and ample hardware crypto blocs for AES128/256, SHA-1 and SHA-2.
The EFM32PG (Peral Gecko) looks like a Jade redux, this time with a Cortex-M4. We could not find other differences. The Cortex-M4 is priced about 50c more.
Spansion was quiet this month.
ST released 9 products, mostly TR versions of existing parts. The STM32F446ZCH6 added a UFBGA package while the STM32L041/031 added a UFQFPN package.
TI was quiet this month on the MSP430, Tiva and C28.
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