Motorola Inc has quietly pulled the same trick as Intel Corp and the 80486SX with key members of its 68000 microprocessor family,stripping out – or disabling – key features to come up with versions that can justifiably be sold at a much lower price. Flagship of the new EC line is the 68EC040 which strips out both the maths co-processor and the memory management unit but maintains the caches at 4Kb each – according to Microprocessor Report it had originally considered cutting them to 2Kb each but decided this would not save enough space to be worthwhile. Transistor count falls to 962,000 from 1.17m and the part, promised for the fourth quarter, will cost just $160 against $595 in the 25MHz version. It should be of interest both to telecommunications companies still using the 68020 in packet switches and telephone exchanges, and also to manufacturers that designed their own memory manager for 68020 Unix machines. The Report says that the 68EC030 simply has the memory manager disabled – but will be offered at less than half the price. The 68EC000 and 68EC020 are aimed strictly at embedded applications and unlike their big brothers are not pin-compatible with the full versions; some signals have been deleted, and the address bus of the 68EC020 is cut to 24 from 32 bits, limiting the main memory to 16Mb. The 68EC000 is simply a version of the original design cleaned up and modernised to eliminate compromises that were necessary in the technology of 1980. The 68EC030 is out in volume now at $43 for 25MHz, $65 for 40MHz when you buy 10,000. The bottom two are sampling now with volume promised for next quarter, at $2.95 for 10,000 of the 8MHz 68EC000, $15 for the 16MHz 68EC020, $19 for the 25MHz version, also for 10,000 or more.
Content from our partners
