Freescale DragonBall
Encyclopedia
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
/Freescale Semiconductor
Freescale Semiconductor
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. is a producer and designer of embedded hardware, with 17 billion semiconductor chips in use around the world. The company focuses on the automotive, consumer, industrial and networking markets with its product portfolio including microprocessors, microcontrollers,...
's DragonBall, or MC68328, is a microcontroller
Microcontroller
A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a typically small amount of RAM...
design based on the famous 68000 core, but implemented as an all-in-one low-power solution for handheld computer use. It was designed by Motorola in Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
and released in 1995.
The DragonBall's major design win was in earlier versions of the Palm Computing platform; however, from Palm OS
Palm OS
Palm OS is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS is designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management...
5 onwards it has been superseded by ARM
ARM architecture
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...
-based processors from Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...
and Intel. The processor is also used in some of the AlphaSmart
AlphaSmart
The AlphaSmart is a brand of portable, battery powered, word-processing keyboards manufactured by NEO Direct, Inc. , currently owned by Renaissance Learning, Inc.-Background:...
line of portable word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s. Examples include the Dana and Dana Wireless.
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It is a 32-bit processor with 32-bit internal and external address bus (24-bit external address bus for EZ and VZ variants) and 32-bit data bus. It has many built-in functions, like a color and grayscale display controller, PC speaker
PC speaker
A PC speaker is a loudspeaker, built into some IBM PC compatible computers. The first IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, employed a standard 2.25 inch magnetic driven speaker. More recent computers use a piezoelectric speaker instead. The speaker allows software and firmware to provide...
sound, serial port with UART and IRDA support, UART bootstrap, real time clock, is able to directly access DRAM, Flash ROM, and mask ROM, and has built-in support for touch screens.
It is an all-in-one computer on a chip; before the DragonBall EZ, Palm handhelds had twice as many ICs.
The more recent DragonBall MX series microcontrollers, later renamed the Freescale i.MX
I.MX
The i.MX range is a family of Freescale Semiconductor proprietary microprocessors for multimedia applications based on the ARM architecture and focused on low-power consumption. The i.MX application processors are SoCs , that integrate many processing units into one die, like the main CPU, a video...
(MC9328MX/MCIMX) series, are intended for similar application to the earlier DragonBall devices but are based on an ARM
ARM architecture
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...
9 or ARM11 processor core instead of a 68000 core.