Migrating to Kinetis or S08GW ?

[Designer11]

Hi All,

Here is a little background on me. I have been programming the QG8 and QE32 microcontrollers for a the last 5 years. I Currently working on a project that required a microcontroller with four serial ports (SCI). I found that i could go with either the 32-bit Kinetis K series or 8-bit S08GW.  The main portion of the code is fully  tested with the QE32 uC and various parts  "glued" together. It looks like the S08GW has limited stock. I have about a month to bring the hardware up and running.

1. Which route should i take to achieve this goal ?

2. What is the learning curve like for transition from the QE32 uC to the Kinetis K (K1x or K2x) ?

Thanks.

[vicentegomez]

Hi Vu

Just to clarify the GW has 4 SCI modules, this is show on the reference manual, but Tony is right the block diagram on the web page only shows 3,our mistake....

from my point of view is easier the migration to the GW than migrate to Kinetis.

Hope this helps

Regards

Vicente Gomez

[tonyp]

Having only a month to complete the job, I would strongly advise against changing MCU family (if you can avoid it).

You say you need 4 SCIs, but the 9S08GW has 3 (according to the block diagram -- although somewhere I saw 4 mentioned -- don't know this MCU).  Here's what I would do (and have done in similar situation when I needed more SCIs than the MCU supported):

Assuming enough CPU idle time is left in your application and the baud rate is not excessively high, you could possibly implement soft SCIs using Input Captures (RX) and some timer for TX (or no timer, if you can afford to block while outputting the bit stream for a byte).

Also, instead of Input Captures (if not enough are available), you could also use a general-purpose input interrupt (like KBI) combined with some general timer to grab incoming bits correctly.

Regarding TX, there's also the possibility of using a single TX 'multiplexed' for more than one channel (assuming common baud rate).

If this works, then maybe you don't even have to move away from the QE32 that you already know well.

Hope this helps.