It's all about the timing

I think my current interest in Freescale's HC08 has everything to do with timing. I've looked at the architecture before, and haven't been excited about it until now.

In fact, I've looked at it several times, initially in 2001 or 2002. I was overwhelmed then with how many families there were, and the lack of easily available development hardware. Also, the parts at that time were quite slow - I believe this was before the introduction of the S08. I ended up instead buying a Cygnal (now SiLabs) board, which I played around with a tiny bit. I was impressed with the idea of an 8-bit CPU running at 25MHz, but unimpressed with the idea of writing code for the 8051. And their parts are $15 in quantity one. The S08JM32 - a pretty comparable part, running at 24MHz, with 12-bit ADC, and the added joy of a USB interface - is $3 in quantity one.

I just discovered Freescale's agitprop zine Beyond Bits, which has been published for the past three summers. Looking at back issues I realised that only now is their lineup compelling to me. The JM USB parts are new, the Flexis (AC, JM, QE) are new. The S08 is fairly new. All of this is recent.

When I looked at the HC08 in 2006, and sampled the 908QB8 and S08QG8 parts, there were very few parts that seemed interesting. For my purposes (wanting DIP16, wanting small package etc) these were really the only matches. They seemed like nice parts, but I wasn't impressed that this was an architecture I could really grow with. There was a way better selection then of PIC and AVR parts, esp in DIPs.

Now things are dramatically different. I'm looking forward to digging deeply into this architecture!