PC8240

The PC8240 combines a PowerPC™ 603e core microprocessor with a PCI bridge. The PC8240's PCI support will allow system designers to rapidly design systems using peripherals already designed for PCI and the other standard interfaces. The PC8240 also integrates a highperformance memory controller which supports various types of DRAM and ROM. The PC8240 is the first of a family of products that provides system level support for industry standard interfaces with a PowerPC microprocessor core.

The peripheral logic PC8240 integrates a PCI bridge, memory controller, DMA controller, EPIC interrupt controller, I2O controller, and a two-wire interface controller. The 603e core PC8240 is a full-featured, high-performance processor with floating-point support, memory management, 16-Kbyte instruction cache, 16-Kbyte data cache, and power management features. The integration reduces the overall packaging requirements and the number of discrete devices required for an embedded system.

The PC8240 contains an internal peripheral logic bus that interfaces the 603e core to the peripheral logic. The PC8240 can operate at a variety of frequencies, allowing the designer to trade off performance for power consumption. The 603e core is clocked from a separate PLL, which is referenced to the peripheral logic PLL. This allows the microprocessor and the peripheral logic block to operate at different frequencies, while maintaining a synchronous bus interface.

The interface of PC8240 uses a 64- or 32-bit data bus (depending on memory data bus width) and a 32-bit address bus along with control signals that enable the interface between the processor and peripheral logic to be optimized for performance. PCI accesses to the PC8240's memory space are passed to the processor bus for snooping purposes when snoop mode is enabled.

The PC8240's features serve a variety of embedded applications. In this way, the 603e core and peripheral logic remain general-purpose. The PC8240 can be used as either a PCI host or an agent controller.