Eight-bit microcontrollers

Freescale Semiconductor has introduced the EL and SL microcontroller families to help embedded designers improve system performance in motor vehicle local interconnect network and general market applications.

Based on the company’s S08 core, the EL and SL families provide an integrated 8-bit solution designed to reduce development time and cost.

The EL family offers increased memory and peripherals, while the SL family targets cost-sensitive applications.

The devices are suitable for developers requiring higher performance for a wide range of motor vehicle LIN applications, such as light sensors, sunroofs, seat position motors, control panels and door locks.

The devices feature embedded EEPROM, on-chip emulation/debug and an embedded slave LIN interface controller (SLIC) module. Unique to the company, SLIC enhances system performance by automating message handling and is designed to outperform other MCU implementations for LIN slave applications.

On-chip EEPROM helps reduce system cost and development time by enabling developers to manipulate diagnostic data at byte level, which provides finer granularity with smaller sector sizes than flash memory implementations.

Operating at up to 40 MHz, the devices claim to offer the fewest CPU interrupts of any comparable 8-bit LIN device.

They have scalable performance and pin compatibility across TSSOP packages.

The families are supported by an ecosystem company and third-party hardware and software tools.

CodeWarrior Development studio for Microcontrollers v.6.2 offers a tool suite that supports software development for future migration opportunities for 8-, 16-, or 32-bit designs.