MICROCONTROLLER SOLUTIONS

NXP Expands ARM Powered Microcontroller Portfolio

With its recent acquisition of the BlueStreak microcontroller product family from Sharp, NXP Semiconductors believes it now offers the world's largest portfolio of ARM7 and ARM9 processor-based microcontroller products.



With an expanded offering of 50 products, NXP Semiconductors enables designers to select a microcontroller solution that best meets their needs in terms of price, performance, features and power consumption. This broad-based offering will increase the range of applications that can use a 32-bit controller.

The nine BlueStreak products include the ARM9-based LH7A4xx and ARM7-based LH795xx and LH754xx devices. All of these, like NXP Semiconductors’ upcoming LPC2478 and LPC2470 announced earlier in 2007, include an LCD controller, in fact, the LPC2478 was the first ARM7 Flash-based microcontroller with integrated LCD support.

The resulting portfolio of 11 low-power ARM processor-based microcontrollers with LCD controller facilitates the use of graphical displays in a wide range of consumer, industrial, automotive and medical applications, from handheld video players and GPS devices to point-of-sale terminals and portable medical diagnostic devices.

The consolidated line represents the industry's widest range of ARM7 processor-based MCUs with LCD controllers, with peripherals including Ethernet, USB, MMU, CAN and 10-bit ADC. Designers can choose from variants with up to 32KByte RAM memory, on-chip frame buffer and touch screen support. The devices also offer glueless interfacing to a variety of external memory devices ranging from standard SDRAM to Compact Flash (CF), PCMCIA, MMC and SD/SDIO formats.

NXP Semiconductors will retain identical device names and support established development and evaluation tools to provide a seamless transition for existing users of the BlueStreak controllers. These include compilers, assemblers and debuggers, plus software library components, evaluation boards and starter kits. The company is also committed to maintaining the existing wide variety of operating system software that supports the BlueStreak MCUs. These range from small, efficient real-time kernels, to fully-fledged operating systems such as Linux and Windows CE.

The nine new BlueStreak products are characterised for use across the industrial temperature range (-40°C to +85°C) and are supplied in Low profile Quad Flat Pack (LQFP), ChipArray Ball Grid Array (CABGA) or Plastic Ball Grid Array (PBGA) packages.

Features

• Nine new ARM-based MCUs
• ARM922T (LH7A4xx devices)
• ARM720T (LH795xx devices)
• ARM7 TDMI-S (LH754xx devices)
• Integrated LCD controller
• Broad range of optional peripherals
  • Ethernet
  • USB (host and/or device)
  • MMU
  • CAN
  • 10-bit ADC
  • On-chip frame buffer
  • Touch screen support
• Up to 32KByte RAM
• Choice of glueless memory interfacing
  • SDRAM
  • Compact Flash
  • PCMCIA
  • MMC
  • SD/SDIO formats.
• Broad range of evaluation and development support
• Variety of kernels and operating systems
• Industrial temperature range (-40°C to +85°C)
• Low profile Quad Flat Pack (LQFP), ChipArray Ball Grid Array (CABGA) or Plastic Ball Grid Array (PBGA) packages

Applications

• Industrial/commercial
  • Point of sale
• Consumer products
  • Handheld video players
• Medical
  • Portable diagnostics/monitoring
• Automotive (after market)
• Recreational
  • GPS/fish finders

For further information, including a copy of the NXP Information Package and the LH7xxxx Product Overview, please click here