Embedded System Product News

ZiLOG Introduces New Z8 Encore XP Microcontroller Family with Exteneded Peripherals

San Jose, Calif., March 24, 2004 - Exemplifying its 30-years of technology leadership in embedded solutions development, Silicon Valley based ZiLOG (NASDAQ: ZILG) today unveiled its new Z8 Encore! XP™ family of Flash Microcontrollers. The new higher performance family increases analog functionality offering 20 MHz processor speed.  The Z8 Encore! XP family also offers lower power improvements over previous Encore families.  At the same time, the company reinforced its strong commitment to the design community and the 8-bit market by offering a new Z8 Encore! XP development tool kit with a full ANSI C-Compiler for only $39.95.

Z8 Encore! XP Family Scores Several Industry Firsts  
Demonstrating a high level of integration with low overall system cost, the Z8 Encore! XP family integrates a full range temperature sensor and a trans-impedance amplifier, which have their outputs processed by an enhanced sigma-delta analog to digital converter.  With the sigma-delta approach, the full 10-bit accuracy of the converter is realized, even with the microcontroller running at full speed, and with no external signal filtering components required.

ZiLOG president Mike Burger, says, "By increasing the level of integration, our goal is to offer our customers a cost-effective solution that we believe is unsurpassed.  With the Z8 Encore! XP family, external sensors are redundant and cost prohibitive for general-purpose applications such as thermostats, smoke/carbon monoxide detectors, as well as the growing white goods market."

According to Burger, "The Z8 Encore! XP family is well suited for other applications, including security, consumer markets and hand-held medical devices where ZiLOG continues to garner positive feedback in early trials."

Z8 Roadmap
“ZiLOG is one of Silicon Valley’s many technology innovators and the Z8 Encore! XP family demonstrates our ability to continuously bring innovative technologies to market", commented Burger. “The Z8 Encore! XP family is our third series of innovative controller families on our roadmap that offer our customers a cost effective solution combined with significantly more analog features and higher operating performance.”

About the Z8 Encore! XP Family
The Z8 Encore! XP is a scalable family of MCUs covering program memory sizes from 1KB to 64KB.  It uses ZiLOG’s register-to-register based architecture and features an 8-channel, 10-bit Sigma Delta A/D converter.  Sigma Delta converters have long been recognized for their superior performance in noisy environments such as in the presence of microcontroller devices operating at high clock speeds.  Unlike competitor A/Ds that are based on successive approximation register implementations, the Encore A/D requires no halting of the processor to get the full 10-bit accuracy.  The Encore A/D is designed to provide further system cost savings by fully integrating the anti-aliasing filters internally, saving on external component count as well as delivering more accurate bandpass performance.  With additional integrated features such as an on-chip-precision internal oscillator, non-volatile data storage memory, and large working memory, the Z8 Encore! XP family performs favorably versus competing solutions:

Table source: ZiLOG
 

Pricing and Availability:
The new devices, which are available immediately, come in 20 or 28-pin SOIC, SSOP and PDIP packages.  The Z8 Encore! XP family will sell for $0.89 for a 1KB device in 20-pin SOIC and $1.44 for a 4KB device in 28-pin SOIC, each in 10K quantities.

About ZiLOG, Inc.
ZiLOG, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZILG) is a global supplier of 8-bit micro logic devices. It designs, manufactures and markets a broad portfolio of devices for embedded control and communication applications used in consumer electronics, home appliances, security systems, point of sales terminals, personal computer peripherals, as well as industrial and automotive applications. ZiLOG is headquartered in San Jose, California, and employs approximately 670 people worldwide with sales offices throughout Asia, Europe and North America.