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NXP announced the availability of its Cortex-M0 based LPC1100 with the members LPC1111, LPC1112, LPC1113 and LPC1114 microcontroller by the end of the year 2009. This new family marks the lowest price of known 32-bit controllers on the market. These devices will compete directly with the recently announced Energy Micro EFM32 Gecko offerings. Both approaches have their benefits. NXP is using a CPU that offers an even lower power approach than the Cortex-M3 and can run faster in MHz than the Energy Micro implementation. On the other hand, the Cortex-M3 offers 30% more MIPS/MHz. It will be very interesting to see the roll-out of the STM32L family that is due very soon as well. As a MCU costumer this can only be good news, very low power, small packages and very low pricing.
The target is most definitely to address customers who want to upgrade from 8-bit architectures without paying extra money and without the penalty of needing extra power. With 15 members initially, the LPC1100 family offers a great starting point to get going with ARM LPC1100 Features
Features of the NXP LPC1100 family of microcontrollers include: - 50 MHz Cortex-M0 processor with SWD/debug (4 break-points)
- 32 Vectored Interrupts; 4 priority levels; Dedicated Interrupts on up to 13 GPIOs
- UART, 1 or 2 SPI, I2C (FM+); 2 16-bit and 2 32-bit timers with PWM/Match/Capture
- 12MHz Internal RC Oscillator with 1% accuracy over temperature and voltage
- Power-On-Reset (POR); Multi-level Brown-Out-Detect (BOD); 10-50 MHz Phase-Locked Loop (PLL)
- 8-channel high precision 10-bit ADC with ±1LSB DNL
- Up to 28 or 42 fast 5V tolerant GPIO pins for HVQFN33 and LQFP48 respectively, high drive (20 mA) on select pins
- Single 1.8 – 3.6V power supply; over 5kV ESD for rugged applications
The data sheet for the LPC1100 family members which covers all, the LPC1111, LPC1112, LPC1113 and LPC1114. The new User's Manual for the LPC1100 (Dec-3, 2009)
Superior Performance to 8-bit solutions
The LPC1100 can not only execute basic control tasks but also more sophisticated and higher accuracy algorithms used in more complex tasks. Shorter time to execute more code translates directly into lower energy consumption. This level of performance is delivered at 50 MHz, with extensive power optimization, at less than 10 mA.
Smaller Code Size in industry benchmark Using the Coremark benchmarks from EEMBC illustrates that the LPC1100 requires 40-50 percent smaller code for the outlined tasks. These benchmarks have been written with modern architectures in mind and they are obviously using other than 8-bit variables. It all comes down to the code that needs to be executed. There could be significant code size reduction if the code executes more complex algorithms at higher accuracy compared to existing 8-bit solutions. Or from a different angle, there is an opportunity to use better algorithms with benefits to the end customer without having a penalty in cost, power or even execution time.
The LPC1100 family is supported by development tools from Raisonance, IAR, Keil, Hitex and others. All of these three companies offer free version of the development suites with a minor cost factor being the JTAG debugger. There is U-Link from Keil, JLink from IAR (or Segger for that matter) and RLink from Raisonance. RLink being by far closest to free, JLink is the most versatile option and ULink2 the best option to work with the Keil uVision4. Pricing and Availability Recommended distribution unit pricing in 10,000 piece quantities for the 33-pin package is: LPC1111FHN33/101 at US$0.65, LPC1112FHN33/101 at $0.75, LPC1113FHN33/201 at $0.85, and LPC1114FHN33/201 at $0.95, with Flash sizes of 8K, 16K, 24K and 32K respectively. In addition, 48-pin LQFP and PLCC44 packages will be available too. |
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