A Burning Ember – The ZigBee XAP-RISC Processor
Recently we have talked a lot about two important CPU architectures, the XAP, and the ARM. ARM recently announced the Cortex-M0 which is implemented in 12,000 gates. Today we received some samples from Ember, makers of very efficient ZigBee wireless chips. Their two main ZigBee solutions are the EM250 SoC, and the EM260 co-processor. As the heart of each of these designs is a XAP2b processor core. a 16 bit RISC design running at 12MHz and implemented in 12,000 gates.
Ember EM250 & EM260 XAP cored ZigBee SoC's
The EM250’s chip area of a mere 7mm square, but pack an enormous punch, integrating a complete ZigBee wireless radio, 128Kb of flash, and 5Kb of RAM.
