Intelligent peripheral modules and applications performed by modular microcontrollers

Microcontrollers of the M68300 and M68HC16 families are built in a modular fashion. These microcontrollers are designed with modules that communicate with other on-chip modules through an intermodule bus. This bus is a silicon bus that is not available outside the chip itself. It is only used between the various modules on a particular implementation of the processor family being discussed in this paper. The intermodule bus is composed of the address and data buses, the interrupt lines and associated interrupt acknowledgement lines along with certain interrupt arbitration circuitry. Using this modular concept, modules can be rapidly assembled to form new derivatives of one of these processor families. Much of the work of implementing a new derivative is simply done with CAD (Computer Aided Design) tools. Still there is considerable work in designing the periphery of the chip so that bonding pads will be properly spaced. However, the focus of this paper is on programming the individual modules.