MCF52259 production stop - migration

[eugenia_suarez]

Hello, 

My company was using this Coldfire MCF52259 MCU some years ago. One day I was googling about this mcu and I found an old paper or a link (I don' t remember exactly which one), where the production for MCF52259 end, was announced. It seems to be another official post where the production stop was canceled, fortunately -for our product line-. Hence, I think this micro is susceptible to disappear from nxp sales, but I don't how many time the MCF52259 sales could stay. 

Time goes by, and now I 'm a bit worried about the future of this microcontroller due our boards dependency. Our firmware uses almost every port and every pin, but they are all configured as GPIOs. We don't use specific communication interfaces. May be, for future features, we would need CAN and UART. And our transmited data will reach too small volumes. Even our IDE has being obsolete. For this and more factors, we start to think about planning a future MCU change. 

1. I'm doing a research in order to get ahead of the moment in which MCF52259 will not be provided anymore. I would like to estimate this. Can I ask this date to nxp support, directly? Where can I get this information from? How many time (approximately) I would have until this product reaches its manufacturing "death"?
2. Once I know the date, the second part of my plan is to choose a new mcu that matches the more into the board with similar functions, pinout, registers if possible. It will be used with the same RTOS than actual (uTasker if possible). The idea is to keep the actual pcb layout and the actual firmware with minimal modifications. Our equipment has using the same fw and pcb board design for many years and we would like to keep this premise (minimum changes). This is the first time I face something like that and I don't know how to start to conclude the best substitute for MCF52259. Of course, we also need a part number that stills manufactured a long time too. Suggestions? 

Thanks for your time.

[TomE]

If you search in this forum for "longevity" you'll get about 14 results.

The most recent one was asked and quickly answered on this forum four weeks ago, here:

How Much longer will the MCF51JM be available 

It points to the "Longevity Pages". Your CPU shows up on the "Archived" Tab with 10 years from November 2008.

Product Longevity|NXP 

But that's the MINIMUM guaranteed lifetime. If people are still buying them, NXP keeps making them.

Also on the above it says they are "supported by standard end-of-life notification policies". You'll have to find out from your distributor what that is as a search doesn't find it on-line.

As to finding a replacement, it is highly unlikely you'll find anything different with the same pinout. Any chips in the same MCF (ColdFire) line are likely to have similar lifetimes. The closest relatives of the MCF52259 are the MCF52256 and MCF52258. They're unlikely to have any different lifetimes to the one you're using.

The Coldfire part with the longest "guaranteed life remaining" is the MCF5441x with 15 years from September 2010. That's a far larger, more complicated and expensive part than the one you're using. It is also "256 MAPBGA" where your one is "144 LQFP" or "144 MAPBGA".

There are no new parts in the Coldfire range. Everything uses ARM cores now. That's "Kinetics", so maybe you should start by downloading all the Data Sheets in that family and making a spreadsheet.

ARM is Little Endian. ColdFire is Big Endian. It is possible your code is "endian neutral" and won't need a rewrite, but unlikely.

You should seriously consider a "Last Time Buy" when the time comes. Just buy enough for 1, 2, 5, 10 years of production, whatever makes sense. Compare the cost of that against the cost of a redevelopment of the boards and all the software, design/IDE, programming, support and production overheads.

Tom

[eugenia_suarez]

Hi, thanks for your answer, I got the link from reading a similar question on this community. I know that the guarantee is the minimum time, but some years ago this part was announced to be stopped. So I was worried about how many time I get to think about another part solution. 

Thanks a lot for your last suggestions. We will take them into account we will consider two options. Your comments have been usefull for me. 

Regards.

[eugenia_suarez]

It seems I have found an answer for my first qüestion: 

One-Stop-Shop Connectivity 32-bit microcontrollers|NXP 

Is it 2008 the launch year? if not, which one?

I still needding answers for 1 and 2 quëstions.

Regards.

[miduo]

Hello,

Yes, it is as Tom already quoted that the longevity issue for ColdFire family.

In general, we recommend customer make reference below link for the product Longevity issue:

Product Longevity|NXP 

Please understand that Product Longevity describes the minimum amount of time a product will be available.  Product Longevity does not say when a product will be end of lifed.  If a product is still active after its Product Longevity period is completed, the decision to EOL the product will be market-driven.  If market demand is high, NXP can and does keep a product active for years after the end of the product’s Product Longevity period.

At present, we do not have any plan to EOL MCF52259.

As for the migration, there has no ColdFire parts can been used for this purpose, we recommend ARM core Kinetis family which really need redesign.