ColdFire MCU with USB and Ethernet?

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ColdFire MCU with USB and Ethernet?

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fiskom
Contributor I
Does anyone know, if Freescale plans to build a ColdFire MCU with USB- and Ethernet-Modules?

How do Freescale divide MCU and MPU? I think it depends on the Internal-Flash.
Under "Freescale Semiconductor MCU Glossary" I can only find the acronym "MCU" but not "MPU".
I know that a MCU includes a microprocessor, so how do Freescale define "MPU"?

Thanks a lot.
Ralf
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w_wegner
Contributor III
Ralf,

what do you mean by "plan to build"?

Have a look at the MCF53xx (except 5307) and MCF54xx (except 5407, IIRC) - they do have USB and Ethernet.

Unfortunately, the family overview
http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/brochure/ColdFire_Overview.pdf
is not completely up-to-date and the parametric search is sometimes a bit hard to use, but at least if you give it some tries with different USB/USB2.0 and 10/100 resp. 10/100 MAC settings, you get these results.

(They also show MCF527[45], that I left out above)

Regards,
Wolfgang
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fiskom
Contributor I
Thank you, for quick response.

But I mean, are there plans to construct a ColdFire with USB, Ethernet and internal Flash?
The ColdFire Overview shows that MCF53xx, MCF54xx and MCF5274 do not include Flash-Memory.

Is my imagination utopian?

The other question: Freescales difference between MCU and MPU?
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w_wegner
Contributor III
Sorry, I should have completely interpreted your posting before answering!

As there are no other answers, just another question: What is the problem you have with an external flash? I was also thinking internal flash would be more convenient, but I get more and more comfortable with the external flash, at least for MCF53xx you can connect it without any external logic, it can be programmed from CPU or BDM without much hassle, and you are flexible in connecting different size parts.

The only advantage I could see if the device would have no external data bus at all and a small package, but I doubt this will happen.

Regards,
Wolfgang
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JWW
Contributor V
All:

Couple of quick comments.

One...

Inside Freescale and in training we do etc, we typically use MCU to reference a part with internal flash and sometimes it may have a small external bus.  We typically use MPU to reference an embedded processor with integrated peripherals and these would include small and large external buses, such as SDRAM, ethernet, PCI, etc...

The industry really doesn't have a clear definition of these two spaces.  In ColdFire our MCU family is typically our V1 and V2 cores.  The V2 core does have some MCU/MPU hybrids and then our V3 and V4 core based products are MPUs.  Many trade magazines and press releases across the industry often use the term "microcontrollers" to cover both MCU and MPU.

In regard to the question on ethernet and USB in an MCU.  Is is our policy to not announce or confirm future parts on public forums.  But I can tell you this is a very real concept (ethernet and USB) in the MCU market space.  And Freescale is always evaluating our customer needs when defining the next generations of our MCU/MPU families.

So all I can say is that we have more and more MCUs coming all the time.  If you'd like to see something specific, please post to the forums and request features and functions.  The moderators will pass on the information.

Hope this helps.

-JWW

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