Any new variants of the ez80F91 or pin-compatible upgrades in the pipe?

We have two new products launching this month.

Zilog does need to better present their road map & info.

Way back in October, mention was made of a Z16FMC (package variant), but yet no more info is showing ?

We are working on a new MCU for the XP family, addressing areas such as more memory, USB and low power.

Zilog could learn from Nuvoton : First info on one Cortex M0 family in Sept, and now in stock at Digikey.

- Learning from the slide above, they have a sub $20 USB Debug/Development stick.
Besides the 32 bit core, these parts are Wide Supply (2.5-5.5V), so can directly drive Power MOSFETS.

Agreed - Zilog just needs to start paying attention to customers again, and I think they'd be back in the ballgame. No contracting out software, no contracting out customer service, and start cranking out some neat designs again.

John
We are soliciting input for variants on the eZ80F91 family that would be of interests to customers and specific needs of various customers. We currently do not have any pending eZ80F91 variants in the pipeline since we are in the investigation phase. Our product roadmaps are generated from customer and market requirements. The more we can hear from our customers about how we can help them solve their struggles the better our roadmaps can target what our customers need.

Gee, we've been telling you guys for years what we need...It seems like Where Zilog really fell off the rails was when they tried to contract everything out, from software development to web pages to tech support. That doesn't work.

Tom Ormiston wrote:

We are soliciting input for variants on the eZ80F91 family that would be of interests to customers and specific needs of various customers. We currently do not have any pending eZ80F91 variants in the pipeline since we are in the investigation phase.

Tom,
Here is a few 'simple' additions you can make :

a) Some vendors are now doing Execute-on-place on uC, from QuadSPI memory. (Cheap SO8 memory)

With the 100+MHz clock rates shipping, this can deliver over 50MBytes/s to a core.
(see Nuvoton NCT6681D as an example, alllowing 8MBytes of Code space on an 8051 core )

SPI SRAM is also available to 32KB, again small and cheap. No QuadSPI SRAM yet, but perhaps soon ?

If you add the HW for multiple QuadSPI interfaces, and support Execute-on-place, that greatly expands the code-ceiling, but
STILL KEEPS the single-chip PCB design area/layer. New designs can add QuadSPI as code-insurance.

b) SDRAM is much cheaper than Large SRAM, so native HW support for SDRAM can break the DATA memory ceiling.

c) Running a small kernel of deterministic code is a common requirement. Some vendors offer threads, and I see NXP have an Asym dual-core that bundles a M0 and a M4 on one die. I'll admit this one is a fairly large change

d) Wide Vcc. This is fairly new ground - before, 8 bit users had to accept lower/multiple supplies to use 32 bit or sometimes even new 8 bit.
Now, 5V and Wide Vcc is making a comeback as vendors handle the regulators on-chip. See Atmel, Freescale, Nuvoton et al.
This one should be important to IXYS !!

e) Better peripherals : Besides the 32 bit cores, another appeal for 32 bit variants, is the better class of peripheral.
Most have FIFOs on their SPI/UART ports, and many have 32 bit timers
A couple of vendors, have ns, and sub-ns PWM precision. These details matter, and should matter to IXYS too.

f) Not silicon at all - fix the appalling web site.
It can be easier to find out what Zilog has, from Digikey, than here!?!
Just one example : Enter eZ80F91, then select first choice of 5 items. eZ80 Modules.

Now take a Zilog part number, or partial, and search here :

EZ80F915005 : Nothing found
EZ80F915005MODG : finds one app note, does not even find the Zilog part ?!

Can you see the problem here ?

hth