ColdFire Projects

As soon as Motorola brought out the first of their ColdFire series of processors (which is said to be the long run successor of the MC68K series), some people gathered in the internet and set up some very good sources of information:

the ColdFire discussion list.

and

the ColdFire GCC site of David Fiddes

After the new (3rd) generation ColdFire Chip MCF5307 was announced, I found that there is quite some interest in a small board with this CPU. In the long run I will need a sucessor for the MIN332 too, so I decided to start work on it. I gave the project the working title

MIN-CF3

I first planned to make it a Eurocard sized board (100mm x 160mm) and provide (amongst all the processors I/O) an ISA96 bus at a VG96 connector and a PC104 interface with the appropriate headers. But after some discussion on the ColdFire list I decided to make it bigger (double Euro, 233mm x 160mm) and include SMSCs Super-IO (FDC37C93x) and ethernet (LAN91C96) chips. Users will still have access to a huge bunch of I/O cards through the ISA connectors - if they still need them.

As for now, the board will finally include:

The MCF5307 CPU
A programmable dual clock generator (ICD2051)
2MB Flash memory
2 banks of SDRAM (up to 32MB total)
512K or 2MB SRAM
ISA96/PC104 interface
Super-IO (FDC37C93x; including FDC, IDE, 2 serial, 1 parallel port, RTC, PC-keyboard...)
Ethernet (LAN91C96) with MAC port and maybe 10Base2

Now add some graphics card and port Linux.... ;-))

Milestones:

block diagram
schematic (coming later)
Yahoo! The CPU sample arrived (May,27 1998)
first photo of part of the prototype board with partly wired address bus (June,20; 90KB)
second photo of the prototype board, now with address & data bus (September 1998; 83KB)

I'll update this page as the work progresses.
(I now (Jan 1999) have to admit, that not too much progress has been made since there were other more urgent projects like e.g. Sandra Maria ;-)

Well, even up to now no real progress was made in this project.
As seen in the discussions in the ColdFire mailinglist, the 5307 still has some bugs and the better, faster 5407 is due to be available soon. Since it has the same pinout as the 5307 (but is no more 5V tolerant), it could well be that on revival of the project I will switch over to the newer core...

back to my homepage

more to come....

Last edited: May 2001 by wsw