Motorola unfurls ColdFire roadmap

Electronic News, August 12, 1996 by Jim DeTar

Austin, Texas--Under a roadmap that will be laid out today by Motorola for its ColdFire embedded microprocessor line, the company will reveal plans to add both DRAM and flash memory on-chip and to reach for the 300MIPS performance level by the end of the decade. Motorola said it will attempt to drive ColdFire into emerging application areas such as DVD (digital versatile disk) and CD-ROM players, cable modems, HDTV and digital cameras.

By unrolling a detailed roadmap, the company is expected to be able to better position the variable-length (VL) ColdFire RISC architecture relative to the PowerPC processor manufactured by Motorola and its Common Hardware Platform partner IBM, thereby answering the question industry observers say is occasionally asked by potential Motorola OEM customers--when should I buy a PowerPC and when should I buy a ColdFire processor.

Mike Frawley, manager of office products systems engineering for Motorola's High Performance Embedded Systems Division (HPESD), said that under the ColdFire roadmap, Motorola plans to extend its performance to the 100MIPS level within the next year, then to increase performance in successive generations to the 300MIPS level by the year 2000.

"One of the advantages of ColdFire is that customers can use the same emulators for the whole roadmap," Mr. Frawley noted. Currently, there are four versions of ColdFire: the 5102, 5202, 5206 and the newest member of the family--the 5204--which Motorola will introduce today. All are manufactured on 0.65-micron process.

In 1997, the company plans to introduce versions of ColdFire manufactured on 0.5-micron, 0.42-micron and 0.35-micron processes in roughly the same time frame, Mr. Frawley revealed. The newer versions will all be 3-volt devices, as opposed to the 5V ColdFire chips available today. It doesn't bother him that the devices are currently being made on a relatively large geometry process and operate at 5 volts.

"Our intention is not necessarily to be on the fastest track; it is to hit the sweet spot of the market," Mr. Frawley said.

Mike Griffith, senior analyst at market research firm In-Stat, commented: "A real key part of their strategy is to incorporate memory into the design. They are trying to build a flexible core and if they integrate DRAM and flash--one of the key issues is time to market--that will help with that issue."

One of the strengths Motorola has is in large deals like a recent one with Hewlett-Packard (EN, July 29), Mr. Griffith noted; but he added that can pose support problems. "You can literally get caught in support until the cows come home and this offloads some support to companies like HP. It makes the whole time-to-market issue easier to handle."

Motorola will today expand its ColdFire family with the introduction of the MCF5204, a version that will be priced starting in the sub-$10 category, will run at up to 33MHz on a 16-bit bus, and is said by the company to achieve up to 13.5 MIPS performance. Samples of the MCF5204 are available priced at $8.96 for a 16MHz version, $9.95 for a 25MHz version and $11.38 for the 33MHz version in quantities of 10,000 units.

The 5102, claimed to offer nearly the same performance as the existing 68040 at virtually half the cost, sells for $15, $19 and $25 for the 20MHz, 25MHz and 33MHz parts respectively.