Freescale Ships 300M S12/S12X MCUs to the Automotive Industry
March 10, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
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Freescale Semiconductor announced it has shipped more than 300 million 16 b S12 and S12X automotive microcontrollers (MCUs) to date.
The S12 and S12X devices are designed to enable scalability, hardware and software reuse and compatibility across an array of automotive electronics platforms, the company said.
The 16 b MCU families are used in body, chassis and safety applications, as well as in cost-sensitive engine control designs.
The S12 devices offer a range of performance and memory options (with on-chip flash scaling from 16 KB to 1 MB) and a migration path to higher-performance S12X MCUs.
"Now shipping at a run rate of more than 100 million units per year, our S12/S12X MCUs are the leading 16 b solutions in the automotive industry," said Paul Grimme, senior vice president and general manager of the Freescale microcontroller solutions group.
"Most of the world's leading automakers and tier one automotive suppliers use Freescale's S12 devices in their body electronics designs. The versatile, high-performance devices are even being used in some advanced hybrid systems, such as the battery pack controllers for GM's full-size hybrid SUVs," he said.
Freescale's S12 architecture features an on-chip XGate co-processor and integrated FlexRay technology.
Introduced on the S12X architecture, the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) based XGate co-processor addresses the design challenge of achieving higher performance without the cost of adding separate processors, Freescale said.
Running at twice the speed of the main central processing unit (CPU) and without CPU processing overhead, the XGate co-processor is engineered to boost system performance by an extra 80 million instructions per second (MIPS) at peak operation.
FlexRay technology provides up to 10 times the speed of existing communications protocols for automotive networks. This high bandwidth enables nimble and versatile stability control systems, precise engine management and weight-saving electronic brake-by-wire systems that eventually may replace bulky hydraulic brakes, according to the company.
Source: Freescale Semiconductor Inc.