Dragonball (processor family)
The Freescale DragonBall or MC68328 is a microcontroller that was developed by Motorola in Hong Kong and released in 1995. It comes from the 68000 family from Motorola, but has additional peripheral functions and has low power consumption.
development
The Motorola 68060 processor can be seen as the forerunner of the DragonBall . This was the last development of the 68000 family, at the same time the first and only representative with energy saving functions. After him, the development of the 68000 core for embedded purposes was continued. For this purpose, the core was expanded to include additional peripherals. At the same time, the complexity was reduced in order to reduce power consumption and manufacturing costs. The ColdFire and DragonBall families emerged from these changes .
use
The DragonBall was used in many devices such as cell phones, but mainly in the first generations of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA, German: personal digital assistant ) from Palm . These small devices for the palm of the hand are - in analogy to the term laptop for portable personal computer - also called palmtop ( Palm , English for palm); the name also refers to the Palm brand.
Starting with the Palm OS 5 operating system , the DragonBall was replaced by Advanced RISC Machines ( ARM ) -based processors from Texas Instruments and Intel .
The DragonBall microcontroller is also used in some AlphaSmart devices.
properties
The DragonBall is a 32-bit microcontroller with an internal and external 32-bit address bus and 32-bit data bus. The fastest version can be operated with a clock frequency of 66 MHz and achieves a computing power of up to 10.8 MIPS (millions of machine commands per second).
The DragonBall has many integrated functions, such as a built-in color and grayscale display controller , a sound controller , a serial interface that supports UART and IrDa , UART bootstrap, real-time clock, DRAM, Flash-ROM and masks can be used - Access ROM directly and has built-in support for touchscreen .
variants
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Over time, the following variants appeared, which differed primarily in terms of clock frequency and computing power:
- 1995 - DragonBall, MC68328: 16.67 MHz / 2.7 MIPS
- 1998 - DragonBall EZ, MC68EZ328 (Red Dragon): 16.58 MHz / 2.7 MIPS
- 1999 - DragonBall VZ, MC68VZ328: 33 MHz / 5.4 MIPS
- 2000 - DragonBall SZ, MC68SZ328 (Super VZ): 66 MHz / 10.8 MIPS
The subsequent DragonBall MX series microcontrollers , later referred to as Freescale i.MX (MC9328MX, MCIMX), are intended for similar applications as the earlier DragonBall devices, but are based on an ARM9 or ARM11 processor core instead of a 68000 core .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Overview on PDAdb.net, accessed on December 7, 2016
- ↑ AlphaSmart is a portable keyboard, similar to a laptop, but which functions like a simple digital typewriter and is used exclusively for word processing.
- ↑ Data sheet of the DragonBall on PDAdb.net, accessed on December 7, 2016
- ↑ Data sheet of the DragonBall EZ on PDAdb.net, accessed on December 7, 2016
- ↑ Data sheet of the DragonBall VZ on PDAdb.net, accessed on December 7, 2016
- ↑ Data sheet of the DragonBall SZ on PDAdb.net, accessed on December 7, 2016