The ColdFire® family combines both benefits of CISCs and RISCs worlds by keeping the same architecture that most customers are familiar and comfortable with, but offering a much higher performance than CISC. ColdFire® processors are based on the concept of a variable-length reduced instruction set (RISC) architecture.

By utilizing a variable-length instruction set, system designers will realize a significant system-level advantage over conventional RISC fixed-length instruc­tions. The ColdFire® support of variable-length instruc­tions provides denser code and less memory usage than any fixed-length RISC machines available today. Although many ColdFire® operations involve efficient 16 bit opcodes, the instruction length can be one, two or three 16 bit words depending on the addressing modes used by the instruction.

When cost-sensitive applications require significant control pro­cessing for file management, connectivity, data buffering and user interface, as well as signal processing in a variety of key markets such as security, imaging, networking, gam­ing and healthcare monitoring, ColdFire® microcontroller devices with numerous on-chip I/O peripherals and memory are the ideal solutions for such applications.