Poll, first brief summary
2004-06-17 by philips_apps
Hi all, to be honest I expected some response but I am pretty much blown away ;-). If you followed the proposals you found that the requests are wide spread and that is exactly what we find most difficult when defining new devices. Every new feature carries a price adder and you, the customers are only willing to take the adders that are beneficial for you. So our goal is to implement peripherals that are needed by a majority of user's while still providing low cost devices. Some detailed feedback to topics that I simply forgot to mention in the list because they have already been implemented in design (yet it will take a few more months before you will see the samples). They should probably hit the market together with the ST devices in Q4 but Philips is less aggressive announcing future microcontrollers before we testing them out. Without being able to give you the Full Monty, some of the features you can expect from upcoming devices: - Wider variety of memory options ranging from 512/32 down to 64/8 - Single voltage supply 3.3V - Useable Real-Time clock during power down BUT probably in the 100 uA range - Counter inputs - More ADC inputs - Brown Out detect .. There will be some more stuff on the new devices but our competitors are monitoring this group as well (and posting links to announcements ;-). The great value of this group is that it is NOT controlled by Philips but is really independent. Comments: 1. smaller flash segments: possible but increases cost. Always looking for trade off 2. executing from Flash while programming another part of the flash. Adds a lot of cost and power. Second charge pump needed. Execute from SRAM instead. 3. LCD controller. Adds lots of pins / cost and only applicable for a smaller percentage of our customers. However, these customers often have high volume. Totally agree with David that asking 5 customers what they need for LCD you get at least 4 different answers :-( 4. Integrated (additional) analog parts. Always a headache but nevertheless our goal. Analog parts can not (easily) be transferred from one process to another. To reduce prices over time (don't you expect that ;-) we have to switch to smaller processes. Analog components make this transfer very high maintenance, hence slow, hence less price reduction possible. We will do our best to further reduce external component count! Thanks everybody who participated so far please keep it coming and I will write up a much more detailed summary after the poll closes. Best regards, Robert