New Advances In Motorola's M.CORE Architecture Deliver Decreased Power Consumption, Added Cache And MMU For Quick Deployment.

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 15, 1998--

Motorola Now Offers Fully Synthesizable Additions To The M.CORE M200

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Designers of battery-powered applications such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), digital cameras, cellular phones, and pagers can now enjoy considerable power savings as a result of several new advances in the M200 M.CORE architecture family of cores introduced by Motorola's M.CORE Technology Center (MTC) Thursday.

Boasting the ideal combination of code density, low power drain and performance, the newest M200 family additions based on Motorola's 0.25 micrometer process show a considerable increase in frequency, running up to 80 MHz and operating at an extremely low 0.25 mW-per-MHz.

"We believe that the low power consumption of the M200 is industry-leading for a 32-bit microprocessor," stated John Vaglica, core design manager for the M.CORE Technology Center. "Coupled with the M.CORE architecture's ability to handle interrupts in a real-world embedded environment, at 80 MHz, the M200 is capable of competing with other architectures which run at much higher frequencies. And, we get the same amount of work done in fewer clock cycles compared to other RISC architectures running over 100MHz."

Introduced last year at the 1997 Microprocessor Forum, and specified at speeds of 50MHz with an industry-leading power consumption of .41 mw-per-MHz at 1.8 Volts, the M200 family was the first in a series of new cores based on the M.CORE architecture. The M.CORE products from which these measurements were based were created in Motorola's 0.36 micrometer process technology. Motorola will continue to move all M.CORE-based designs to more advanced processes thereby enabling future M.CORE offerings that are even smaller and more cost-effective.

Premium Performance With The M240 Core

Packing performance and flexibility into new generations of consumer, transportation, and industrial products, the newly announced M240 version of the M200 family couples the M200 core with an 8K byte unified instruction/data cache, a low-power MMU (Memory Management Unit), and Little Endian support. The M240 will provide designers with an excellent platform for evaluating the core as well as for creating new integrated products that will benefit from the additional performance the core delivers. With Big and Little Endian support, the M.CORE architecture can now take advantage of operating systems that require Little Endian operation. The M240 is expected to be available in Q1`99 with evaluation platforms expected to appear in Q2`99.

Synthesizable Leadership Continues With The M200S

The announcement of the new M200S fully synthesizable M.CORE processor continues the leadership in synthesizable design established by Motorola with its ColdFire line of cores. The introduction of the M200S will mark the genesis whereby this expertise is applied to the M.CORE architecture. Available for deployment in Q1`99, the M200S has only a 60 percent increase in area from the M200 and only a reduction in frequency of 20 percent.

"Our strategy is to offer synthesizable cores for rapid time-to-market, licensing and prototyping, while also offering hand packed cores optimized for low-power," said Jim Thomas, vice president and director of the M.CORE Technology Center. "This way customers can decide if they want a core that takes full advantage of the M.CORE architecture's ultra low-power design or one that is quickly deployable, but still able to take advantage of the core's high code density."

About M.CORE

Quickly recognized by the embedded market as an innovative solution for many design needs since its October, 1997 introduction, Motorola's ultra-low power, micro-RISC M.CORE architecture boasts a multitude of design wins in the demand-driven electronics, portable, consumer, wireless, industrial, and transportation markets. The M.CORE technology combines Motorola's unparalleled technical RISC experience with its vast expertise in control-oriented applications. Designed with optimized growth in mind, the core's inherent design features and best-of-class development tools deliver a cutting-edge solution that is ideal for a wide range of highly integrated, low-power embedded computing applications where memory efficiency, time-to-market, and system cost are critical.

About Motorola

As the world's No. 1 producer of embedded processors, Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector offers multiple DigitalDNA solutions which enable its customers in the consumer, networking and computing, transportation, and wireless communications markets, to create new business opportunities. Motorola's semiconductor sales were $8 billion in 1997.

Motorola is a global leader in software-energized wireless communications, semiconductors, and advanced electronic systems and services. Motorola creates cellular telephone, two-way radio, paging, data and satellite communications systems and products that enable people to take their worlds with them. Motorola's embedded semiconductors are essential digital building blocks for consumer, networking and computing, transportation, and wireless communications markets. Other businesses include automotive electronics, components, computing, and energy products. Sales in 1997 were $29.8 billion.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Motorola is a registered trademark and DigitalDNA is a trademark of Motorola Inc. M.CORE is a trademark of Motorola Inc. ColdFire is a registered trademark of Motorola. All other tradenames, trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.