Freescale Semiconductor innovation with the ColdFire Version 1 brought a new concept by providing their customers a method to easily upgrade their applications from 8 bit architecture to 32 bit architecture. This concept enables the customer to upgrade their applications with a much higher performance with little or no change.

Today, there are many applications based on 8 bit architectures, in particular the popular Freescale HCS08 microcontroller family. To provide customers with an easy migration path, Freescale put together a new cost reduced version of two microcontroller families, one is based on the ColdFire Version 1 core (CFV1) and the other is based on the HCS08 core. These two architectures are often referred to as the Flexis or the QE128 family.

The Flexis family is integrated with many I/O Peripheral devices, these I/O devices, these Peripherals are identical on both archi­tectures, and are designed and manufactured pin-to-pin compatible. Since most system developers write their application software in high level language such as C or C++, sys­tem designers are able to remove an HCS08 MCU from its socket and replace it directly with a ColdFire V1 without any modification. The only modification that may be needed to the hardware is to change crystal oscillator if there is a need to run at a much higher frequency than the HCS08 devices.

Freescale’s Flexis family will debut about a dozen 8 and 32 bit chips, counting all the variations of features and chip packages. These variations boil down to one basic 8-bit MCU (the MC9S08QE) and one basic 32-bit MCU (the MCF51QE).

The Flexis and ColdFire V1 Microcontrollers textbook covers both cores and all on-chip I/O peripheral devices with many program examples to address system designers with the information they need and to provide them with the migration path.