eZ80Acclaim!™ Product Family of Microntrollers


 

Overview

This site gives a synopsis of the eZ80Acclaim!™  family of microcontrollers, which debuted sometime in 2003, manufactured by Zilog.  This family of 8-bit microcontrollers consists of three types which differ by such things as size of Flash, SRAM, chip speed, number of I/O lines, number of 16-bit timers, and some other miscellaneous features.  All three types in the family can support up to 16 megabytes of external memory, however. Following is a table outlining the three types and their differences.

Product Number  Flash  External Memory  SRAM  Speed  I/O  16-bit Timers  EMAC  Other Features 
eZ80F91 256 16 MB 16K 50 32 4 Yes EMAC, PLL, RTC, 4 PWMs, JTAG
eZ80F92 128 16 MB 8K 20 24 6 -- RTC, JTAG
eZ80F93 64 16 MB 4K 20 24 6 -- RTC, JTAG

I will be focusing on the eZ80F92 product, however, since it is the mid-range chip in the product family and will give a good idea of the features of both the low- end (eZ80F93) and high-end versions (eZ80F91).



Microcontroller Specifications

The eZ80F92 device is a high-speed single-cycle instruction-fetch microcontroller with a maximum clock speed of 20 MHz. It is the first member of ZiLOG’s new eZ80Acclaim!™ product family, which offers on-chip Flash program memory. The eZ80F92 device can operate in Z80-compatible addressing mode (64 KB) or full 24-bit addressing mode (16 MB).  It operates between 3.0–3.6 V supply voltage with 5 V tolerant inputs.  It's operating temperatures range from 0ºC to +70ºC for the standard model (Zilog part number: eZ80F92AZ020SC) and –40ºC to +105ºC for the extended model (Zilog part number: eZ80F92AZ020EC) .

The eZ80F92 is logically divided into several distinct circuitry blocks (see Figure 1.) which controls a certain aspect of the chip.

It contains 100 pins (see Figure 2.) and comes in what Zilog calls a LQFP which stands for Lead Plastic Low-Profile Quad Flat Package.  Of those 100 pins, 24 provide general I/O consisting of three ports; which Zilog names ports B, C, and D; of 8 bits each.  The chip also has 2 integrated UART IC's which communicate with the outside world by having the first UART share port pins D and the second UART share port pins C.  In additon, it also has built in infrared encoder/decoder circuitry which allows it to communicate with compatible infrared transceivers that adhere to the IrDA Physical Layer Specification Version 1.4.  This allows the microcontroller to communicate with infrared enabled deivices such as PDAs, printers, etc.  Communication between the microcontroller and the infrared transceiver is done thru two port D pins.  In additon to the forementioned circuity, the chip has has built in circuitry for the SPI and I2C bus interface standards.   SPI is an abbreviation for Serial Peripheral Interface and I2C is an abbreviation for inter-integrated circuit.  These two standards allow for communication between two or more different devices.  As far as memory, the eZ80F92 has 128 KB on-chip Flash program memory and an extra 256 bytes configuration Flash memory with 8 KB on-chip high-speed SRAM.  It also has 24 address pins which allow it to access up to the 16 megabytes of external memory.  It has six 16-bit Counter/Timers and one Watch-Dog Timer.

Two other interesting features are it's debugging interfaces.  The two provided are ZDI and JTAG.  ZDI is an abbreviation for ZiLOG Debug Interface which is a proprietary Zilog technology. ZDI provides a built-in debugging interface to the eZ80® CPU. Control is provided via a two-wire interface that is connected to the ZPAK II Debug Interface Tool.  This two wire interface uses the TCK and TDI pins.  JTAG is an abbreviation for Joint Test Access Group which was a consortium of companies that came together to define a standard for testing integrated circuits and boards.  This makes use of the TCK, TMS, TDI, and TDO pins.

Zilog's product brief for the eZ80F92/eZ80F93 can be found here.

Zilog's product specification for the eZ80F92/eZ80F93 can be found here



Programming, Development Environments, and Cost

Zilog offers a development kit which contains the necessary hardware to interface with the chip and an IDE along with an ANSI C compiler, assembler, linker, librarian, and sourcelevel symbolic debugger.  As with the 8051, writing code is done on a PC and then downloaded to the chip.  Digi-Key, who is a major retailer of Zilog products, sells the the development kit for $399.95 and just the eZ80F92 microcontroller for $18.75.  However, they offer the following price breaks for just the eZ80F92 microcontroller; 25 units for $351.56 ($14.06240 per unit), 100 units for $893.00 ($8.93 per unit), and 500 units for $3,906.25 ($7.81250 per unit).

I also came across this site which provides an open-source compiler/assembler and monitor(including disassembler) for the Z80 CPU which according to my research is compatible with the eZ80F92 microcontroller.  It runs under LInux and DOS.



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