Processors

I am looking at a number of processors for this project. They will all be 0.8mm pitch spacing Thin Quad Flat Packs. This means that they are either 32 pins or 44 pins. Not sure why the electronics industry end up doing it this way but there you go... They are NOT the most popular sizes to it will limit the range of processors that I will look at. The plan is to kick off with the KV10 from NXP (was Freescale and before that was Motorola). This processor is a fairly simple (the reference manual is less that 1000 pages) ARM of the Cortex M0+ variety. The original Braids was a STM32 running an ARM Cortex M3. The clock rates are very similar 75MHz Vs 72MHz but there is a bit less FLASH and RAM. That shouldn't make a huge difference but maybe the core will -- I haven't seen too many comparisons of performance of the M0+ against the M3 but the suggested performance is ~0.95 DMIPS/MHz against the 1.25 DMIPS/MHz of the M3. However the older STM32 on the original Braids has to insert 2 wait states when running code out of FLASH... I suspect that the eventual performance won't be a million miles away...

Once we have got that going then I will have a crack at an STM32 M4 processor. Then maybe a Cypress (was Spansion) M3, even a Microchip PIC32 which is a bit left field...