Swindon, Wiltshire-based GEC Plessey Semiconductors Ltd has announced three 32-bit microcontrollers designed for high performance communications. The General Electric Co Plc company has designed the Butterfly, Spider and Mantis microcontrollers around the Advanced Risc Machines Ltd’s ARM7 RISC core. The Butterfly is an entry-level product for cellular phones and data adaptors, and low-end Personal Communicators, and features two UARTs, a two-channel Direct Memory Access and 8-bit programmable peripheral interface designed for fast on-board commuications. The Spider has the same basic design but includes an on-chip V2.1 PC Card slave interface. It has a four-channel Direct Memory Access controller with programmable source and destination devices, and one UART, and the company sees it being used in Asynchronous Transfer Mode PC Cards. Mantis features a 16-bit programmable peripheral interface and a second UART interface and it is aimed at higher-end embedded systems that require a larger number of input-output ports such as a controller for bridges and routers. Butterfly can be clocked at up to 25MHz at 5V, 15MHz at 3V, Spider and Mantis do 30MHz or 20MHz at the same voltages. Butterfly is sampling now at $17.50 for 25,000-up; Spider at $23.50 and Mantis at $32.00 will follow.
