AMCC has announced the PowerPC 405EZ industrial processor, the first of a family of high-performance networked industrial MPUs, available in speeds up to 400 MHz, low power consumption (typical 0.6 Watts) solutions for small footprint system-on-a-chip designs.

Key to the performance of the PPC405EZ is its on-board 32 Kbytes of SRAM, CellularRAM -compatible external bus with arbitration, 64-bit on-chip bus, along with a fully configurable Chameleon© timer, IEEE1588-compliant Fast Ethernet, USB and CAN.

Applications that were once the exclusive domain of 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs performing only a few tasks embedded in isolated equipment is now often accomplished by tightly networked, intelligent devices with multi-tasking capabilities. These new systems require higher performing 32-bit SoCs (system-on-chip) to handle the additional tasks of networked communications, more sophisticated processing algorithms, and more complete operating systems such as Linux, while still providing the low cost and extended temperature operation required by these classes of equipment.

Traditional sub-133 MHz 32-bit RISC-based and DSP-based MCUs, burdened with their slow speed on-chip busses and Flash memory, struggle under this new additional communications and processing workload. Even if these traditional Flash-based MCUs can be pushed to higher clock speeds, the on-chip Flash and narrow 32-bit bus speeds do not scale: this usually results in little data and I/O throughput improvement.

As the name implies, the unique PPC405EZ's unique configurable Chameleon© Timer enables designers to mimic or construct virtually any type of timer architecture and produce complex deterministic timing, thereby freeing the CPU and bus bandwidth.

Examples of these complex real-time functions include PWM and space vector PWM functions with non-overlap times, quadrature encoder sensing and control, programmable "deadband" intervals, pulse period measurement, 48-bit input capture function, 48-bit output compare function, and IEEE1588 timestamps.