Melbourne, Florida based Harris Corp has launched the first standard product to be built around the Forth-based RISC core processor originally developed by Novix Inc of Cupertino, California (CI No 698). Priced at $190 in the US the Harris RTX 2000 is a 10MHz 16-bit programmable microcontroller rated by Harris at 10 MIPS for embedded real-time applications and is the founder member of what will be a standard product line of real time embedded controllers aimed at vision systems, robotics, digital signal processing and real-time artificial intelligence applications. On chip features include parameter and return stack memories, single cycle 16 by 16 hardware multiplier, an interrupt controller plus three general purpose timers. It also boasts an ASIC Bus which provides a parallel communications interface to ASIC peripherals for system enhancements such as hardware acceleration or design flexibility through application specific input output. The company claims the RTX 2000 is the first microcontroller to execute Forth code directly, thereby eliminating the need to revert to assembly language when programming for real-time applicat ions. It also plans to add cross compilers for C, Prolog and Ada languages. Samples of the RTX 2000 are available now and production quantities will be available in the third quarter, and there are plans to introduce a simplified version for lower complexity applications some time in the next quarter.
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