68HC microcontrollers

John A. Zoidberg

Veterans of microcontroller programmers may have used/stumbled on these stuff already.

However, I read that there are so many appliances are still hanging on to the 68HC and 68HC-based cores, despite being an old technology.

I believe during the 80s, it was famous, and it's still used in some colleges by the lecturers for teaching.

I worked with the 68HC11 for a few while, and found that it's a pretty robust microcontroller. The more advanced versions have assembly codes for fuzzy logic systems.

Leon

They are still made, as the Freescale HC08 MCUs:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/taxonomy.jsp?code=HC08FAMILY

TonyD

The 68HC11 chip was very popular during the 80's and early 90's. We used it on several projects and I know of a couple of companies that still use it today for legacy stuff. I think both MIT and Seattle Robotics Group had a board design which found its way into many different hobbyist projects.

I really liked the range of SPI peripheral chips you could use with, the 68HC68T1 RTC springs to mind.

Motorola's documentation and application support was second to none as well making it a nice package to use.

JoannaK

Yep.. HC11A8 (A1?), D3 and others.. Quite nice controllers on their time, I may still have some around here.

Pharseid380

I think I still have a couple around too. I remember the 6809 being fairly Forth friendly (2 index registers), but I don't remember about the 68HC11. Also, someone from Motorola did an article in Byte about threaded interpreters, I had the feeling that there were some Forth programmers among the designers of those 8-bit chips.

-phar