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Are new M68K chips still produced? I looked a while ago, but couldn't find any.
by juliangoldsmith 8y ago
Are new M68K chips still produced? I looked a while ago, but couldn't find any.
- duskwuff 8y agoBarely. The 68SEC000 is still in production, but is NRND.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoWhat about the second-source vendors? Historically I know there were Hitachi ("HD" prefix), Toshiba ("TMP" prefix), and Signetics ("SN" prefix) parts. At one point I saw a modern-looking Atmel data sheet for a TS68C000 (Thomson/STMicro license?), but I don't know how recent that actually was. The Hitachi line, at least, seems to be explicitly EOL by Renesas. I'm not familiar enough with the other vendors to know who might have picked up their licenses.
- duskwuff 8y agoI suspect those are all gone too. TS68C000 went EOL in 2010 -- it was produced by Thomson-CSF, which was acquired by e2v. One interesting avenue to explore might be the Sega Genesis. It's still being produced in Brazil, believe it or not -- and there must be some sort of 68000-compatible processor at the core of those.
- yuhong 8y agoI think many was EOLed when the Freescale Sendai fab shut down.
- saagarjha 8y agoI'd assume so, since there are still many devices that use them!
- bryanlarsen 8y agoYes. They're known as ColdFire processors now, and they're sold by NXP.
- duskwuff 8y agoColdfire is a rather different product, though. The instruction set is similar but not identical, and there's no exposed memory bus. (Most of the parts have internal flash and SRAM, like a modern microcontroller.)
- MisterTea 8y ago> The instruction set is similar but not identical, and there's no exposed memory bus. Actually, there are a number of offerings in the coldfire v2/v3/v4family with decent performance and external buses including PCI, 10/100 ethernet, USB, ATA, and CAN with DDR memory and parallel bus interface. https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MCF5307BUM.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MCF5307BUM.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MCF54418.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MCF54418.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MCF54455.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MCF54455.pdf
- duskwuff 8y agoOh, the modern ones absolutely have other external busses -- but not a standard 68000 memory bus. There's no way to hook up an EEPROM with your program on it, for instance.
- MisterTea 8y agoI see what you are talking about. While the external bus interface on these cold fire parts is not a pin compatible m68k cpu bus, it certainly can access memory devices and uses DMA. From the 5307 manual: 1.3.7.1 External Bus Interface The bus interface controller transfers information between the ColdFire core or DMA and memory, peripherals, or other devices on the external bus.
- rjsw 8y agoI used one of the first generation dev boards, it had external DRAM and ROM.
- 8y ago
- mrpippy 8y agoNXP still makes a range of ColdFire-based chips, which is based on M68k
- joezydeco 8y agoThe 68K evolved into two lines: the Dragonball and, more recently, the ColdFire line. NXP is continuing production of the ColdFire parts. Dragonball evolved into the iMX line by swapping the 68K core for ARM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXP_ColdFire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXP_ColdFire
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bwldrbst 8y agoI've got one of these: http://apollo-core.com/index.htm http://apollo-core.com/index.htm in an Amiga. It's an insane amount of fun. "Apollo Core 68080 is the natural and modern evolution of latest 68000 processors. It's 100% code compatible, corrects bugs of 680x0 designs and adds on top most of the cool features which were invented the years after."
- jacobush 8y agoCheck this out. Apolle core should have a neon sign above it.
- alxlaz 8y agoAFAIK, no, at least not for the general market, but they're pretty easy to get on Ebay, AliExpress & friends.