Automotive Mobile Audio Video

Philips Semiconductors announced today sampling of the XA-G3 microcontroller, the first member of Philips' 16-bit XA (eXtended Architecture) family.

The G3 is a powerful, general-purpose microcontroller, suited for use in the most popular embedded control applications. It offers upward compatibility with the 80C51.

"Philips Semiconductors is the leading supplier of the popular 80C51 microcontroller in part because we have provided the widest selection of derivatives in the industry," commented Mike Thompson, Product Marketing Manager for the XA family of microcontrollers. "We are employing the same strategy with the XA: first addressing large market applications with several general-purpose controllers, later proliferating into numerous, more specialized applications.

The XA-G3 is the first member of a new family based on Philips XA architecture, which provides very high performance, superior code density, and upward compatibility for 80C51 users. Philips' XA-G3 is the only 16-bit microcontroller that is code compatible with the popular 80C51 architecture.

Jerry Banks, Principal Analyst at Dataquest, a research firm based in San Jose, Calif., said, "Other than speed improvements in terms of increased clock rates, little has been done to improve the performance of the 80C51 family since it was introduced in the early 1980's. The announcement of a 16-bit version of the 80C51 architecture will be welcomed by many users."

With the XA-G3, Philips has extended the world of 80C51 microcontrollers into the 16-bit realm, allowing users to use the familiar 80C51 architecture in higher performance applications. Philips' XA-G3 easily handles a broad range of high performance embedded requirements in the computing, communications, automotive, and consumer market segments. Applications include PC peripherals, television, mass storage, point of sale (POS) terminals, modems, communications controllers, and automotive systems.

While the XA-G3 is compatible with the 80C51, its performance as a 16-bit microcontroller has not been compromised. The XA-G3 is 2 to 3 times faster than the 80C196 (at the same clock frequency). With a 30MHz clock the XA-G3 has a typical instruction execution time of 100 nanoseconds. With all this flexibility, the XA-G3 is very competitively priced under $7 in OEM quantities. Production shipping of the G3 is slated for Q3 '95.