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What a Steaming Load of Sales Hooey. Sorry, but that's what it is to a frustrated design engineer who's been using Zilog parts since about 1985, when it was still a real innovator. Like Z8 and Z80 days. I have helped Zilog sell many tens / hundreds of thousands of chips over the years.
You have to understand the frustration at this side, Steve. Zilog has a neat chip, and neat tools, and at one time offered some really neat opportunities. The zGate software package looks kind of cool and we'd love to explore using it in our products. But this weird stance of offering nothing more than a software upgrade pre-loaded onto an 8+ year old CPU design - for 25 cents -and then telling us its only available on a certain part number - and its somehow "impossible" to make it available as a stand alone software upgrade for existing hardware in the field makes no sense.
This makes it impossible to offer the upgrade to our customers with existing equipment, and makes it impossible to design new products that are compatible with systems in the field and in the inventory stream.
Embedded security? Really?? All you're doing is loading come code onto the unprotected FLASH memory of a CPU chip. Its not like its a masked ROM. So what happens if I or a nitwit user issues a chip erase command over the JTAG port? Poof! It gone. The ZGate documentation says if this happens I'm supposed to call Tech support (?) and I presume there is a way to re-load the chip's firmware. So how does anyone at Zilog know to what chip I'm putting the firmware on to?? Over how many thousand boards???
So why on Earth would we stick with Zilog for new designs? One of the only "Pros" was that even though its very mature and fairly expensive for an 8-bit product, it (used) to have great software and tools that could be upgraded across all parts, new and old. Now that's all gone, Steve. Now we have an old chip locked into existing software. Any incentive to use firmware based on zGate is lost. At least for all the production applications I know about.
For new designs we have no choice but to look at the sub $7, 32 bit Cpu chips that are faster and lower power, that are up to date. Where we can get low-level RTOS critical code sections in masked ROM. Etc.
Where is the innovation here?? Gosh I wish the old Zilog was around - this would never happen. Where the design engineers actually listened to users requests, and offered real solutions to real problems.
Nothing personal Steve. Its just what's happening to what used to be a great company. At least that's the impression on this side.
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