Motorola Establishes Success of MPC500 Microcontroller in Powertrain With Shipment of 4 Millionth Device

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The automotive industry's foremost microcontroller (MCU) architecture for powertrain management systems, the MPC500, recently marked a significant milestone. Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) has shipped more than 4 million units of this 32-bit MCU family, which implements the PowerPC instruction set architecture, to automotive customers including leaders such as BMW, Delphi, Visteon, Marelli and many more, for use in engine and transmission management applications.

The MPC500 Family is helping auto makers deliver many of the features drivers have come to expect: improved accelerator response, advanced engine diagnostics, increased fuel efficiency, reduced emissions and misfire prevention and detection. This MCU family will also be critically important in implementing advanced features including electronic valves, combined starters and alternators, adaptive cruise control, by-wire applications and hybrid electric/gas cars.

Since its introduction with the award-winning* MPC555 MCU, the MPC500 Family has rapidly gained acceptance throughout North America, Europe and Japan as the leading microcontroller architecture in powertrain control applications. With the strong success of the MPC500 Family in engine control systems, it is projected that 25 percent of all vehicles in production by 2005 will have an MPC500 MCU controlling their powertrain systems.

"Our market analysis shows that Motorola continues to hold No. 1 market share for the automotive electronics and with good reason," said Chris Webber, vice president, automotive electronics, Strategy Analytics. "With powertrain applications being the harshest of automotive electronic environments, Motorola has again shown that it can deliver reliable, high performance semiconductors that meet the tough performance requirements of the world's leading automotive electronics manufacturers."

Automotive manufacturers face tremendous pressure from consumers and regulators to deliver cars that use less fuel, produce fewer emissions, and drive better. Being first to market with the most advanced technology is increasingly important to automakers as stringent government regulations and consumer demand continue to drive these improvements in a vehicle's performance.

"Motorola lead the market with the introduction of the first engine controller in the 1970s," said Franz Fink, general manager of Motorola's 32-bit Embedded Controller Division. "We continue to lead by pushing the envelope on powertrain MCU power and performance helping manufacturers produce cars that are more responsive, safer to drive, longer lasting, cleaner burning and more fuel efficient."

Motorola's MPC500 Family -- The Standard for High-End Automotive Applications Well suited for complex, control-intensive applications, such as engine and transmission control, the growing MPC500 Family includes the MPC555, MPC561/2, MPC563/4 and MPC565/6. Each device in the growing family features a 32-bit RISC core that is compatible with the PowerPC instruction set architecture. Computational abilities are increased with a floating point unit that is standard on all the MPC500 Family of devices, designed for high performance and flexibility embedded system design engineers need to tackle complex control functions. MPC500 MCUs offer a variety of memory size options and I/O peripherals, such as time processor units, CAN interface modules and queued analog-to-digital converters, among others.

The MPC500 Family also includes devices with the latest code compression technology engineered to allow internal memory to be expanded by up to 45 percent, addressing the increased code sizes needed for advanced powertrain systems without increasing the size of the MCU. Code compression also offers significant speed improvements when using external Flash memory. Motorola MPC500 MCUs are designed to meet the harsh performance requirements of automotive systems: temperature ranges from minus 40 degrees C. to plus 125 degrees C., high humidity, and sudden changes in environmental conditions.

With the next generation MPC5500 Family, Motorola provides a direct migration path, addressing future OEM requirements, and offering the long-term sustainability of customers' products that are based on existing MPC500 devices. The innovative MPC5500 MCUs, capable of 200MHz operation at automotive temperature ranges with up to 4M embedded Flash memory, are designed to enable electronically controlled valve systems and camshafts as well as to enable electric and gasoline engine control functions to be integrated into a single engine control module. The MPC5500 family is intended to be scalable from ABS systems to high-end engine control modules.

A comprehensive suite of hardware and software development tools is available for the MPC500 Family from Metrowerks and independent tool developers to simplify and shorten customers' development cycles. In addition, Motorola offers a broad portfolio of low-level driver software, providing an established platform from which to develop engine control and timing systems and helping to simplify development processes for Powertrain Control System OEMs. The low-level driver products are engineered to be compatible across the MPC500 Family and are already featured in a number of vehicles using these devices today.

About Motorola

As the world's #1 producer of embedded processors, Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector creates DigitalDNA(tm) system-on-chip solutions for a connected world. Our strong focus on wireless communications and networking enables customers to develop smarter, simpler, faster and synchronized products for the person, work team, home and automobile. Motorola's worldwide semiconductor sales were $4.9 billion (USD) in 2001. http://www.motorola.com/semiconductors .

Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) is a global leader in providing integrated communications and embedded electronic solutions. Sales in 2001 were $30 billion. http://www.motorola.com /

    * Motorola was the first semiconductor supplier to be recognized for
      quality, cost-efficiency, and innovative technology when it won the
      PACE(tm) award for the MPC555 in 1999.

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