We are changing the format of the newsletter slightly, and will cover one of our parts each month. This month, I will talk about the TK68HC811E2.
The TK68HC811E2 is one of our older processors, and dates from the late 70s. It uses the HC11 core, and is noteworthy in that it has 2K bytes of EEPROM. In an era when all other micros were One-Time-Programmable (OTP), it was one of the first re-programmable processors. As such, it found its way into many industrial systems and is still in use today.
This was an evolutionary dead end for Motorola. The EEPROM could not keep up with the densities being achieved with EPROM, and so Motorola did not use the EEPROM approach with other members of the HC11 family. Nonetheless, the part has survived to the present time.
When Tekmos started to reverse engineer the HC11 family, we created a common gate array to implement the different family members on. We chose to include 768 bytes of EEPROM on this array, along with 768 bytes of RAM, and 24K of ROM. We did so knowing that this prevented us from making the 68HC811E2, as well as the 68HC11F1, which had 1K of RAM.
Then we came across an opportunity for the 68HC811E2. The opportunity was large enough for us to create a new gate array for the chip.
We are exhibiting this month at the HiTec conference in Albuquerque, and will be featuring this part there.
