Motorola Inc’s Microprocessor & Memory Technologies Group in Austin has now announced the Fuzzy Inference Development Environment software development tool from Aptronix, the San Jose-based fuzzy logic development company it signed with last month (CI No 1,865). It also announced an open data structure for representation of fuzzy systems, saying that it is a major stepping stone towards the eventual standardisation characteristic of all mainstream technologies. The tools are designed to enable applications specialists to give standard microcontrollers fuzzy logic capabilities, and the first to be supported are the 68HC05 and 68HC11 8-bit families; the 68HC16 and 32-bit 68300 microcontroller families and the 56000 signal processors will be supported as well. The environment provides facilities to design and simulate an entire dynamic system, including microcontroller-specific hardware so users can evaluate design scenarios. The product has tools for system design, development, testing, debugging and code generation, including the Fuzzy Inference Language, which supports many fuzzy operators, inference methods and defuzzification techniques. The Real Time Code Generator is claimed to make object code very efficient: it generates assembler source for Motorola chips. The analyser gives a three-dimensional surface view to give a clear picture of the response function. Designers can also trace from a point on the surface to the originating source code. Motorola and Aptronix also agreed to establish the Fuzzy System Standard Environment data structure by which fuzzy logic systems are represented, as an open standard that is freely available to the public. Motorola calls the development tool M68HXBFIDS and will start ships in May at $1,500.
