Freescale broadens Kinetis MCU range to 900 products

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Looking to offer increased performance and better power efficiency, Freescale has announced the second generation of its Kinetis K MCU range, in which the K1x, K2x and K6x families are expanded and the K0x range is added. The Kinetis MCU portfolio is said by Freescale to features more than 900 devices, of which 600 are Kinetis K series variants.

Innovations from the Kinetis L series have been used to add low power modes to the second generation K series MCUs. This is said to bring 'dramatic' improvements in performance and power efficiency. The parts run from 100 to 180MHz and have much lower static power consumption. Devices will be available with up to 2Mbyte of flash and 256kbyte of SRAM. Steve Tateosian, Kinetis global marketing manager, said: "We have applied a few things in terms of architecture and how we get more performance at a particular technology node, including things to improve power consumption and smarter peripherals." Freescale has also expanded its software offerings for Kinetis products, claiming it now provides the most comprehensive MCU software and tools support. There is a new Kinetis software development kit, a suite of peripheral drivers, stacks, middleware and RTOS adaptors, a Kinetis design studio IDE, and on chip bootloaders. Kinetis Design Studio IDE is said to be free of charge and unlimited, offering an Eclipse and GCC based approach to editing, compiling and debugging in C and C++. Also available is the Processor Expert, which allows users to create, configure generate software and drivers for most of Freescale's MCUs. The Kinetis K63, K64, K24, K22, K21, K12 and K11 MCUs are in production, with Kinetis K22 derivatives and K02 MCUs sampling. According to Freescale, more devices are planned for later in 2014.