Lpc2000

>    From: "philips_apps" <philips_apps@...>

> Today I would like to pick your brains and get the top-ten charts
> of most wanted features in future LPC2000 devices. I promise this
> will have an impact on product definition planning if a large
> number of you participate.

Since we can easily fit our web server with CGI and ASP in a 
2106 with serial EEPROM for page storage, Ethernet would be 
great. A proper RTC would be nice, but there are plenty of I2C 
solutions. Most of our industrial clients want Ethernet or USB. 
However, for USB the FTDI devices are fairly cheap and avoid all 
the hassle of writing PC device drivers. If you provide USB, 
please make it that easy.

But above all, make the GPIO faster and document the interaction 
between LDR/STR instructions, the VPB and the MAM. As a compiler 
vendor, I'm spending too much time writing app notes that should 
be in the user manual. As an application writer, I'm reinventing 
the wheel far too often. This wasted time increases the cost of 
2xxx development for us and our clients.

Again for fast GPIO use, when we use several GPIO pins as a bus 
we have to go through contortions. If there were OPDATA and 
OPMASK registers life would be simple, especially if writing to 
the OPMASK register also set the direction register - we spend 
too much time doing read/modify/writes and the three cycle LDR 
plus VPB overhead kills us.

Since someone at Philips has already written test code, it 
should easy to provide a simple example (10-30 lines) in the 
user manual for each peripheral. Just the basics, no interrupts, 
just simple initialisation and use IN ASSEMBLER. You've got that 
lovely I2C hardware, but the referred example is for an 8051 and 
porting our bit-banged master code took less than hour, so we 
didn't bother. Old-timers fondly remember the days when monitor 
listings were included in CPU data sheets.

You can always put standard example drivers on your web site. 
When you do this, please make sure that they work - debugging 
the Samsung S3C4510B Ethernet driver example still haunts me!

Have a look at the Atmel PDC as an alternative to full-blown DMA.

But, despite all this it's a great series. The bad news for 
Philips will only be that as far as we are concerned the 8051 is 
dead. When an ARM is as good as an 8051 at bit-banging that will 
be truly something.

Stephen

--
Stephen Pelc, stephen@...
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 23 80 631441, fax: +44 23 80 339691
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