Piscataway, NJ – 5 February 2003 – The Nexus 5001 ForumSM today gave its strong support to Motorola’s recently announced family of high-performance 32-bit PowerPC® microcontrollers. The MPC5500 family of microcontrollers will offer system performance up to five times faster than previous versions and represent the improvements of the second generation of Nexus-compliant silicon to reach the market. The first device, the MPC5554, is expected to be the first microcontroller on the market that will be compliant with the next version of the IEEE-ISTO Nexus 5001TM specification, planned to be released by the Forum later this year.
Motorola’s next generation MPC5500 devices represent two additional firsts for the industry and for the Nexus 5001 Forum. The Motorola devices feature a Nexus Class 3 interface and will employ the highest-level Nexus compliant interface ever put on a microcontroller. The devices will also be the industry’s first to connect a single Nexus port to multiple data processor elements – four in total.
Additionally, implementation of the Class 3 interface specification now brings dynamic debugging, the ability to monitor system activity while the processor continues to run, into the silicon itself. With a standardized industry interface, embedded developers can now monitor data writes and also read/write to memory locations while the processor continues to run in real time.
For the Nexus 5001 Forum, Motorola’s recent announcement confirms that the IEEE-ISTO Nexus 5001TM specification is gaining critical widespread adoption in embedded systems. Developed as a cooperative effort by the members of the Forum – a consortium of 17 microprocessor and development tool vendors – IEEE-ISTO Nexus 5001™ specifies an open, global, general-purpose interface for development, debugging and optimization of embedded systems.
“We’re very pleased when we see the Forum’s members work the specification into their product lines,” says Michael Healy of Ashling Microsystems, chair of the Nexus 5001 ForumSM. “We believe the Nexus 5001 ForumSM is a critical specification for the industry, and Motorola’s expanding use of this powerful debug protocol is good testament to its importance. Developers and users of this latest embedded processor family will benefit from high-performance Nexus 5001™ compliant development and support tools.”
Motorola has been an active participant in the Nexus 5001 ForumSM since its inception, and with the 2000 rollout of one of the industry’s most integrated microcontrollers, the MPC565, the company helped the Forum reach a major milestone: industry implementation.
“The decision to put the Nexus 5001™ interface on the next generation MPC5500 embedded processors was straightforward – no other debug interface would meet our customers’ requests for improvements in high-performance, real-time tools,” said Ron Stence of Motorola and the Forum’s vice chair. “The Nexus specification is really starting to have the kind of market impact that the Forum envisioned with the industry realizing the benefits of a standard debug interface from within the heart of the embedded processor to the hardware and software interface layers.”
About the Nexus 5001 Forum
The Nexus 5001 ForumSM membership spans the semiconductor, development tools and automotive electronics industries. Although the initial focus of the consortium was on the stringent requirements of automotive powertrain applications, the overall goal of the Forum is to enable the continued development of state-of-the-art, easy to use, high performance microcontrollers. The Forum plans to release an updated version of IEEE-ISTO Nexus 5001TM specification mid-year 2003.
Current members of the Forum are: Alphamosaic, Ashling Microsystems, Delphi, dSPACE GmbH, ETAS, Hitex, IAR Systems, Infineon Technologies, iSystem GmBH, , Lauterbach, Motorola, National Semiconductor, Nohau, Renesas Technology,Siroyan, STMicroelectronics and Wind River.
The Nexus 5001 Forum is a program of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO), which provides administrative and management support to industry consortia and other standards development forums. The IEEE-ISTO 5001™-1999 specification can be freely downloaded via the Nexus 5001 Forum website: https://nexus5001.org.
The PowerPC name are trademarks of International Business Machines, used under license therefrom.
Media Contact:
Greg Kohn
Program Manager
Nexus 5001 Forum
C/o IEEE-ISTO
+1 732 465 6486
[email protected]