Although Motorola Inc is expending energy turning PowerPC chips into microcontrollers, it has not turned its back on its bread and butter 8-bit microcontroller business and just announced a low-cost chip, reprogrammable version of its 68HCO5 family of chips, priced at less than $1 per chip. The 8-bit 68HC705J1A microcontroller, or just J1A, expected to be available this quarter, represents a change of strategy in response to customer requests, Motorola officials told Dow Jones & Co. Paul Grimme, an operations manager for Motorola’s HC05 family of microcontrollers, said companies planning to use microcontrollers in a product generally would start by ordering a chip with Electrically Programmable ROM, or Erasable Programmable ROM. The chip would be used as a prototype, with information added and erased until a final version was decided on, Grimme said. The company then would give the chip to a fabricator like Motorola or NEC Corp, for conversion into a cheaper, mass-produced set of ROM chips. That process presents a problem when the product manufacturer has to meet a strict deadline, because the conversion to ROM chips can take eight to 10 weeks or more. The new J1A controller reduces the premium that manufacturers have to pay to go directly into production with Electrically Programmable ROM chips, said Tom Marischen, marketing manager for Motorola’s Austin, Texas-based Customer Integrated Specified Circuits Microcontroller Division. The J1A has 1Kb of Electrically Programmable ROM, enabling designers to do fast prototyping, customising the chip’s circuitry to meet the requirements of new products, quickly. Traditional Electrically Programmable ROM chips cost three times as much as ROM chips, making their use in mass production unfeasible, he said. The J1A narrows the historic gap between the more expensive reprogrammable parts used in experimental product design and the unalterable factory-programmed parts that are simpler and cheaper because they are produced in high volumes. The one-time programmable J1A chip will be sold for a 30% to 50% premium over traditional ROM chips, or less than $1 each, Marischen said. Marischen said Motorola customers had indicated they would be willing to pay a premium in that range because the gain in time-to-market made it worthwhile, he said. But while more expensive than ordinary ROM, the next cheapest such chip offered by Motorola costs $2.25. Marischen said Motorola was unsure of the exact extent of the market for the new chip, but he expected considerable interest. Its competitors were likely to follow suit with similar chips, he added. If you’re going to survive, you’re going to have to do what the customer wants. The introduction of the J1A follows the announcement of two other one-time programmable chips, the 68HC705C4A and 68HC705P9 announced in recent months that offer greater amounts of memory and pin connector sizes. At 4Kb of reprogrammable memory, the 68HC705C4A offers the largest capacity of the three chips and is priced at just over $4 in high volumes, while the 68HC705P9 offers 2Kb and is priced at $2.40 per unit in volume.
