Good day All,
I thought I would say thank you and Kudos to Freescale and the Old Motorola for making such impressive and reliable Microcontrollers. I say this, as I was recently tasked with updating a design that I did way back in 1996 that used a MC68HC811E2FN. This was one of the first field programmable HC11's and was definitely ahead of its time and of the competition. I used this little controller in an Elevator Security Card Access system that was installed into a medium sized office tower (37 floors - 15 Elevators) to offer the building operator the ability to lock or unlock floors based upon the user's access credentials as well as the time of day. At the time there were very few systems capable of doing this and the one's that existed were fairly clunky. Anyway, the system was finally upgraded and not because of any issues, but simply because of age... which in itself is impressive... All of the CPU cards were installed in 1996 and ran 24/7/365 since then with 0 failures! This may not seem overly impressive, however, the older elevator systems created really nasty electrical environments... high heat, voltage (600V DC), and EMI ... and even through all this those little HC11's worked away doing what they were supposed to do... I am still amazed at how well these devices worked and bewildered at their obvious long term reliability! To Freescale and all those at Motorola who had their hand in the HC11 program, Kudos to you all and all the best to the current Freescale processor designers!
Cheers,
Sam
