National Semi's CP3000 is a connectivity processor

Santa Clara, Ca. -- National Semiconductor Corp. has just made available a new family of CPU it feels fills a unique place in the embedded and small footprint internet-centric computing market: bridges between different types of network standards/

Designated, the CP3000 series, this family of embedded connectivity processors, which includes the hardware, software, development tools, and technical support to essentially act as a bridge between different types of network standards. "The explosive growth of the Internet has given birth to various local and wide area network standards," said Joe Montalbo, VP for National's Device Connectivity Division. "National's CP3000 family enables communications between networks and nodes with different standards and protocol stacks."

The CP3000 processors include Flash program memory and a variety of embedded peripherals, such as USB, CAN, USART, SPI, and Access.bus interfaces. Also included on-chip is a fully embedded Bluetooth interface that includes baseband processing, a host protocol stack, and dedicated profiles. These make the family suitable for a variety of products including those that use Bluetooth technology in homes and vehicles, hands-free speaker systems, automobile entertainment systems, utilities metering, digital still and streaming cameras, standalone keyboards, universal headsets, and digital multimedia speakers.

Manufactured using the company's 0.25µm CMOS process, the CP3BT10, CP3BT13, CP3UB17, and CP3CN17 connectivity processors feature National's CR16C 16-bit RISC microcontroller core, 256kB of on-chip Flash, 10kB of on-chip RAM, and an additional 8kB of on-chip data flash.

Additional functions and interfaces include versatile timer units, multifunction timers, audio interfaces, USART, programmable I/O ports, and a watchdog timer. The processors run up to 24MHz and operates from -40°C to 85°C.

Both the CP3BT10 and CP3BT13 connectivity processors include the Bluetooth baseband and allow the implementation of a fully embedded Bluetooth stack with a customer's application code.

Each interfaces with the LMX5250/1 Bluetooth transceiver and allow easy access from user-developed application code to Bluetooth functionality through an Application Programming Interface. This allows a designer to program the host protocol stack and dedicated profiles into the on-chip flash program memory, eliminating the need for a separate host/system controller, saving cost, board space, and power.

The CP3BT10 integrates USB, Access.bus, and USART interfaces, while the CP3BT13 connectivity processor integrates CAN, Access.bus and USART interfaces.

The CP3UB17 and CP3CN17 connectivity processors suit automotive, industrial, PC, and consumer applications where Bluetooth technology is not required. The CP3UB17 provides USB, AccessBus, I²C and SPI interfaces, while the CP3CN17 offers CAN, Access.bus and SPI interfaces.

All of the CP3000 connectivity processors are sampling now. For 1,000-unit quantities in 48-pin packages, the CP3BT10 is $7, the CP3BT13 is $7.25, the CP3UB17 is $6.40, and the CP3CN17 is $6.50. For 1,000-unit quantities in a 100-pin LQFP, the CP3BT10 is $8.00, the CP3BT13 is $8.25, the CP3UB17 is $7.40 and the CP3CN17 is $7.50. The LQFP package allows up to 8Mb of external memory.

Go to http://www.national.com/ for more information on this product.

And for more information about the issues, competitive products and technologies discussed in this story, go to the  iAppliance Web Views  page and call up the associatively-linked XML/Java Web map of the iApplianceWeb site and search for product information since the beginning of 2002.

For technical article coverage, go to EETimes In Focus maps on the same Web page and browse or quickly search for all articles on a particular topic since the beginning of 1998.

These Web Maps can be browsed by date, by category, by title, or by keyword, with results displayed instantly either as a list of possible hits or with the specific Web page.