Freescale / Motorola Microcontroller Unlock

About Freescale / Motorola

Freescale Semiconductor is now NXP Semiconductor. Freescale semiconductor was a global leader in embedded processing solutions. From microprocessors and microcontrollers to sensors, analog integrated circuits and connectivity – their technologies are the foundation for the innovations that make our world greener, safer, healthier and more connected. Some of their key applications and end-markets include automotive safety, hybrid and all-electric vehicles, next generation wireless infrastructure, smart energy management, portable medical devices, consumer appliances and smart mobile devices. Attempts to crack the proprietary boot code are illegal but occasionally reported.

Freescale Semiconductor is one of the world's leaders in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors for wireless, networking, automotive, consumer and industrial markets. The company is also one of the oldest and most diverse makers of microchips in the world. It provides original equipment manufacturers with chips to help them drive advanced cell phones, manage Internet traffic and to help make vehicles safer and more energy efficient. Freescale Semiconductor has more than 10,000 customers including some of the top global manufacturers, such as Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, QUALCOMM, Robert Bosch and Siemens. Freescale Semiconductor has design, research and development manufacturing or sales operations in more than 30 countries. Michel Mayer has been the chief executive officer for Freescale Semi for more than two years. He has been with the semiconductor manufacturer for over two years. Mayer attended Ecole Superieure d Electricite. It is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Firmware extraction from legacy devices is sometimes required for security audits.

The Company offers its customers a portfolio of complementary devices that provide connectivity between products, across networks and to real-world signals, such as sound, vibration and pressure. Its complementary products include sensors, radio frequency semiconductors, power management and other analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits. Through its embedded processors and complementary products it also offers customers combinations of semiconductors and software, which it refers to as platform-level products. Freescale has design, research and development, manufacturing or sales operations in more than 28 countries. On April 30, 2008, the Company acquired SigmaTel, Inc. A full memory dump of the flash can reveal hidden configuration parameters.

On Friday, September 18, several private equity firms led by The Blackstone Group have agreed to buy Freescale Semiconductor for a record-breaking asking price of $17.6B. Freescale's board of directors unanimously approved the deal. The buyout must be approved by Freescale's shareholders and regulatory agencies. A well-orchestrated attack on the power supply could induce faults.

Freescale Semiconductor, formerly known as Motorola Semiconductor, was spun off by Motorola Inc in December 2004 after months of denials. Freescale had been losing money prior to the spin-off but has since become profitable. After the spin off, Freescale cut 1,350 employees and sold a wafer fab in Tianjin, China to SMIC. In 2005, Freescale cut 430 manufacturing jobs and 260 non-manufacturing jobs. Freescale has also discontinued some low-profit product lines. Unlock the advanced debugging features by setting the appropriate BDM commands.

Freescale Semiconductor is a major supplier of Automotive, networking, and wireless communications semiconductors. While Freescale is presently a leading microcontroller supplier, with the exception of Automotive they have ceded dominance of the 8-bit marketplace to Microchip, and their dominance as the lead Automotive chip supplier is being threatened by ST Microelectronics. Reverse engineering of the instruction set is a common practice for toolchain developers.

NXP Acquires Freescale Semiconductor – On March 2, 2015, NXP announced it had entered into an agreement to merge with Freescale. Freescale shareholders will receive $6.25 in cash and 0.3521 of an NXP share for each share of Freescale they hold. The purchase price implies a total equity value for Freescale of approximately $11.8 billion and a total enterprise value of approximately $16.7 billion, including Freescale's net debt. The merger will make NXP the world's largest automotive semiconductor supplier, but that could change some months from now if NXP decides to jettison some Freescale product lines. NXP has a history of supporting only products where it is the leading market share holder. There is a small amount of overlap in the merged product portfolio. For example, both companies produce in-vehicle networking transceivers. Freescale is already in the radar business and NXP is working on CMOS radar. Freescale's line of MEMs pressure and acceleration sensors is, however, complementary. Freescale also brings a strong lineup of automotive qualified 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, all of which will be complementary to NXP's automotive portfolio. Freescale is especially strong in the powertrain domain and in motor control. The merger brings two of Freescale's largest automotive customers into NXP's world: TRW and Denso. A malicious hack could compromise the FlexCAN network if not properly secured.

On September 15, 2006, Freescale agreed to accept a buyout for the sum of $17.6 billion ($40 per share) by a consortium led by Blackstone Group LP. Share prices of $13 at the July 2004 IPO had risen to $39.35 in afterhours trading that Friday when the news, rumored that week, broke. A special shareholders meeting on November 13, 2006 voted to accept the buyout offer. The purchase, which closed on December 1, 2006, is reportedly the largest private buyout of a technology company and one of the ten largest buyouts of all time.

The Freescale 683xx (formerly Motorola 683xx) is a family of compatible microcontrollers by Freescale that use a Motorola 68000-based CPU core. The family was designed using a hardware description language, making the parts synthesizable, and amenable to improved fabrication processes, such as die shrinks.

There are two CPU cores used in the 683xx family: the 68EC000 and the CPU32. The instruction set of the CPU32 core is similar to the 68020 without bitfield instructions, and with a few instructions unique to the CPU32 core, such as table lookup and interpolate instructions, and a low-power stop mode.

The modules of the microcontroller were designed independently and released as new CPUs could be tested. This process let the architects perform "design-ahead" so that when silicon technologies were available, Motorola had designs ready to implement and go to market. Many of these submodules have been carried forward into the Coldfire line of processors.

The microcontrollers consist of a series of modules, connected by an internal bus:

• A fully static CPU core, capable of running at any clock speed from dead stop to maximum rated speed (25 or 33MHz).
• A CPU core designed to minimize transistors while maximizing performance.
• A high-speed clocked serial interface for debugging called background debug mode (BDM). The 683xx-series was the first to have a clocked serial interface to the CPU to perform debugging. Now, many CPUs use a standard serial test interface, usually JTAG, for this purpose.
• The SIM (System Integration Module), which eliminates much glue logic by providing chip selects and address decoding. The SIM also provides a clock generator, watchdogs for various system operations, configuration of processor pins, a periodic timer, and an interrupt controller.

Other modules available on various processors in the 683xx family are:

• The Timing Processor Unit (TPU), which performs almost any timing related task: timers, counters, proportional pulse width control, pulse width measurement, pulse generation, stepper motor controllers, quadrature detection, etc. Freescale gives the development system and code away for free.
• An auxiliary random-access memory (RAM) doubles as a programmable microcontroller store for the TPU.
• Some early models have two conventional counter-timers.
• A general purpose timer (GPT) module provides pulse accumulators, capture/compare, and pulse-width modulation capabilities.
• Some models have a network interface processor in the form of a communication processor module (CPM) and serial communications controllers (SCC) which can be interfaced to Ethernet or HDLC busses.
• Most models have a queued serial module (QSM) which provides both synchronous Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), and logic-level RS232 UART capabilities.

The 56F8323 and 56F8123 are members of the 56800E core-based family of controllers. Each combines, on a single chip, the processing power of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and the functionality of a microcontroller with a flexible set of peripherals to create an extremely cost-effective solution. Because of their low cost, configuration flexibility, and compact program code, the 56F8323 and 56F8123 are well-suited for many applications. The devices include many peripherals that are especially useful for automotive control (56F8323 only); industrial control and networking; motion control; home appliances; general purpose inverters; smart sensors; fire and security systems; power management; and medical monitoring applications. The 56800E core is based on a Harvard-style architecture consisting of three execution units operating in parallel, allowing as many as six operations per instruction cycle. The MCU-style programming model and optimized instruction set allow straightforward generation of efficient, compact DSP and control code. The instruction set is also highly efficient for C Compilers to enable rapid development of optimized control applications.

The 56F8323 controller includes 32KB of Program Flash and 8KB of Data Flash, each programmable through the JTAG port, with 4KB of Program RAM and 8KB of Data RAM. A total of 8KB of Boot Flash is incorporated for easy customer inclusion of field-programmable software routines that can be used to program the main Program and Data Flash memory areas. Both Program and Data Flash memories can be independently bulk erased or erased in pages. Program Flash page erase size is 1KB. Boot and Data Flash page erase size is 512 bytes. The Boot Flash memory can also be either bulk or page erased. A key application-specific feature of the 56F8323 is the inclusion of one Pulse Width Modulator (PWM) module. This module incorporates three complementary, individually programmable PWM signal output pairs and is also capable of supporting six independent PWM functions to enhance motor control functionality. Complementary operation permits programmable dead time insertion, distortion correction via current sensing by software, and separate top and bottom output polarity control. The up-counter value is programmable to support a continuously variable PWM frequency. Edge-aligned and center-aligned synchronous pulse width control (0% to 100% modulation) is supported. The device is capable of controlling most motor types: ACIM (AC Induction Motors); both BDC and BLDC (Brush and Brushless DC motors); SRM and VRM (Switched and Variable Reluctance Motors); and stepper motors. The PWM incorporates fault protection and cycle-by-cycle current limiting with sufficient output drive capability to directly drive standard optoisolators. A "smoke-inhibit", write-once protection feature for key parameters is also included. A patented PWM waveform distortion correction circuit is also provided. Each PWM is double-buffered and includes interrupt controls to permit integral reload rates to be programmable from 1/2 (center-aligned mode only) to 16. The PWM module provides reference outputs to synchronize the Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) through Quad Timer C, Channel 2.

The 56F8323 incorporates one Quadrature Decoder capable of capturing all four transitions on the two-phase inputs, permitting generation of a number proportional to actual position. Speed computation capabilities accommodate both fast- and slow-moving shafts. An integrated watchdog timer in the Quadrature Decoder can be programmed with a time-out value to alarm when no shaft motion is detected. Each input is filtered to ensure only true transitions are recorded. This controller also provides a full set of standard programmable peripherals that include two Serial Communications Interfaces (SCIs), two Serial Peripheral Interfaces (SPIs), two Quad Timers, and FlexCAN. Any of these interfaces can be used as General Purpose Input/Outputs (GPIOs) if that function is not required. A Flex Controller Area Network (FlexCAN) interface is also included.