[Efi332] alternate processors

[Andrei Chichak]

At 10:19 AM 12/30/2006, you wrote:
>I came across some mention of the "bigstuff3" controller and saw 
>that he is using an Infineon TriCore processor.  Is there anyone on 
>this list who has worked with these? Or for that matter anything 
>non-Freescale? Just curious to hear feedback relative to Freescale offerings.

I had a look at the processor that is in the bigstuff3, he calls it 
the SABC 16x but it should be the SAB C16X. We were looking for a 
processor that would do various timing related tasks, nothing too 
esoteric, just a whole bunch of it. The candidates were PICs, 
68HC12s, Analog's Blackfin, the C16x, and the 68332. We went for the 
'332 because the TPU gave us a huge amount of flexability, which is a 
huge advantage when management keeps changing the specs. We were also 
looking for a well established processor from a well established company.

As it turns out we rolled our own microcode to give a bunch of UARTs, 
PWM, an extra SPI, and some digital I/O. As I said, nothing too 
esoteric, but it was really easy to add an extra UART without adding 
extra chips.

On the bigstuff3 pages he has a processor comparison. As far as the 
customers are concerned this metric is pretty irrelevant. If the 
system idles 50% of the time or 75% of the time and it does the job, 
then either processor is adequate.

Also, if Motec needed a faster processor, they could switch their 
68332 over to an MPC56X or a Coldfire with a TPU much easier than 
switching to the "faster" C16X family.

Basically then C16X looked like a pretty normal but fast processor.

Andrei