Leo wrote:
You must be an engineer , like me .

Oh yes. And one frustrated by non-technical people calling the shots on issues they don't understand. Many a great engineering company has been driven into the ground by forgetting that the whole former success of that very company had been built on brilliant engineering, and quite often very little else.

It is hard to see the future of 8 bits mcu : some say everything will be 32bits ( Arm ) since its so more powerfull , sw
support , cheaper every year , but we see very strong "resistance" of 8 bit mcu's in market share and also applications
will never need more than that : battery charger , long play / low power mp3 , basic power management like
standy/wake up control (over ethernet ) , basic gps controls embedded in apps , etc ... mostly smart GPio's.

Well, there is a remote possibility a Zilog Cortex is about to be released, or it may have died internally.
Zilog have not commented on that thread yet, so it looks like it died...

I did notice that Zilog have QFN versions of their 8 bitters, and sheer size is one space 32 bit struggles
with.

One of the big complaints we were hearing was the website, so we are working on ways to improve that. The first step was the Forum and the Video sections. There are more changes in the works.


Here is a very good example, of a Start of the Art uC, and good Web support
www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_s...KB&tid=vanrs08kb

Website:

Note the lack of glossy, warm fuzzies marketdroid images
Note the well laid out page, quick summaries, and clear links to Documents and tools
Note the Chip block diagram info
Note the tabs, and especially the buy/parametrics one
Note how the tabs, and links, pretty much all fit within one screen
Note how 'save link as' works

Devices:
This is not as easy to fix, but it does show what makes a small uC truly flexible
- well, maybe the package can be easily added.. ?

Note the good range of small packages. QFN8.SO8. SO16, TSSOP16, TSSOP20
Note the WIDE supply capability 1.8~5.5V
Note the choice of Oscillators (Atmel could learn here..)
Note the nice sub uA wakeup heart-beat type oscillator ( IIRC, I think Zilog get close here)

5.5V is important for direct MOSFET drive, as few power mosfets are rated for 3.3V Gate Drives.
SO16-150mil, is an emerging uC package. [ SO8 tends to be pin-bound, and SO20 is massive.]
SO16-150mil, is ideal mid-ground: single sided PCB, trace between pins, very low mfg costs.

This is a really interesting and fundamental topic, glad you asked, Ed.

From a current perspective as an, er, "enthusiastic smalltime developer" with a couple of decades of other hardware design and support experience, I guess the question for me boils down to this:

Is it more likely that Zilog will use these new community interface tools (forums, video gallery, etc) as a means to find out where some/any users are heading with the technology, and to shape products and services around those ideas and suggestions, or will the marketing and engineering and support directions be defined internally, and the community discussions just filtered for confirmation? (Sorry to sound so negative, I just have a bad feeling about mergers and synergies, based only on my own limited experience with HP, Agilent, and Compaq mergers/splits and synergies - quite a few of us got synergised out of a number of jobs that had to be "un-synergised" later).

I understand that even before the "holistic synergistic communion" with IXYS, Zilog didn't have the bandwidth (or business benefit) in listening to anyone who's bought less than 500 CPUs in 25+ years. But at least Tom's listening, so that's a big step in the right direction!

Given the designer/developer demographic I'm aware of (WRT Zilog silicon and the Z80 architecture specifically), there are an incredible number of smaller designers/developers (and even just enthusiasts) out here, some with very long ties to Zilog, and that would seem to be an enormous amount of goodwill (and "market segment inertia"). What I hope most is that the "dabblers" and younger designers can get on board early on in their careers and get to know the Zilog products before the Microchip/Atmel marketing strategy overwhelms their perspective of what's possible with these products. Sorry, got a bit OT there...

And puh-lease don't change the name to a combination of the two companies' names. Although, "XYZilog" would be easy to spell

5.5V is important for direct MOSFET drive, as few power mosfets are rated for 3.3V Gate Drives.
SO16-150mil, is an emerging uC package. [ SO8 tends to be pin-bound, and SO20 is massive.]
SO16-150mil, is ideal mid-ground: single sided PCB, trace between pins, very low mfg costs.
Jim, I couldn't agree more. Those are the exact issues I have with current chip geometries and interface/supply issues, and not just Zilog.

I don't mind designing with the sub-26mil SO/QSOP/LQFP and BGA packages, but due to my limited resources, those need to be well packaged as development modules for initial parametric testing.

The eZ80F910200ZCOG module is a case in point - great design, good minimal integration (PHY, RTC, external SRAM and flash ROM) that doesn't distract from the underlying architecture/pinout, and really well documented.

The eZ80F916005MODG Mini-Module wasn't nearly so well structured, and had completely different header pinouts, so testing the latest MCU silicon rev requires redesign of the test carrier board. I ended up buying second-hand F91ZCOG modules on eBay and hand-swapping the MCU (after reflashing so the sysclock would work without the PLL). I know that's not typical, but the alternative was to buy 3 or 25 of the obsolete 'F91 modules or commit to the LQFP or BGA package and make my own.

One thing I do like about the eZ80 MCU is the 5V-tolerant pins. Maybe in 5 years' time this won't be an issue, but it sure is right now.

One thing I do like about the eZ80 MCU is the 5V-tolerant pins. Maybe in 5 years' time this won't be an issue, but it sure is right now.

Oh 5V is not going away - quite the opposite!!.

There is a growing number of Wide Supply devices being released, and a strong push from Automotive Customers to mandate 5V for some key areas

** ADC have better noise immunity at 5V
** No-one makes 3.3V Power Mosfets with low RDs

"5V tolerant" was an interim fudge solution, now that on-chip regulation is more common, 5V power is the better spec.

So we will see more solutions like the newest Silabs/Freescale/Infineon ones, where they run the core at lower voltages to suite their process-of-the-day, but the Vcc and IO and ADC ranges, are all 5V.

The newest offerings from Freescale and infineon, are very close to ~50c price points, _with_ core regulators and ADC.