Infineon Expands Its Offering of Feature- and Cost-Optimized Solutions for the Industrial Market; Launches New 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit Microcontrollers Leveraging its Automotive Expertise

Munich, Nuremberg, Germany – February 14, 2006 – Today at the Embedded World show 2006 in Nuremberg (February 14 -16), Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) announced the availability of new microcontroller (MCU) products. The new Flash MCUs, including 8-bit, advanced 16-bit and high-end 32-bit TriCore family of devices, are optimized for use in demanding industrial applications.

The Infineon MCUs are well-suited for use in motor control systems, providing engineers with the ability to increase the energy efficiency and performance of industrial drives. In particular, Infineon MCUs support industry-best real-time performance (e.g., reaction time to external events), which is ideal for demanding industrial applications. The highly integrated MCUs also can reduce system-level costs by up to 40 percent compared to conventional solutions with numerous external components, such as DSP, PWM ASIC, Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), external oscillators, and other components, in addition to the microcontroller. It is estimated that broad use of electronically controlled drives, besides making systems more reliable, has the potential to save up to 20 percent of today’s electrical energy consumed worldwide.

“With respect to microcontrollers dedicated to industrial applications, Infineon brings more than 35 years of automotive experience into play. Our industrial customers will benefit from our high levels of product quality and our broad system expertise combined with in-depth application competence,” said Peter Bauer, Member of the Board and Head of the Automotive, Industrial and Multimarket business group of Infineon Technologies. “It is our goal to offer an innovative product portfolio covering the complete control cycle comprising microcontroller, sensors and power semiconductors that match the market requirements of industrial applications.”

According to the market research company IMS, Infineon ranks number four in the industrial semiconductor market, which IMS forecasts to steadily grow by an average of 7 percent per year from 2004 to 2010 (source: IMS Research, July 2005).

The new XC886 and XC888 MCUs enhance the XC800 family of 8-bit microcontrollers by providing advanced networking capabilities, based on integration of both a full CAN controller and LIN support on a single chip. The on-chip CAN module offloads the CPU handling most of the networking functions.

Introduced in 2005, the Infineon XC800 family is the most advanced and cost-effective 8-bit microcontroller offering on the market, combining an enhanced 8051 core with embedded Flash memory and powerful on-chip peripherals, such as an intelligent PWM unit or a highly accurate 10-bit ADC. Advanced features of the XC886 and XC888 MCUs include high compute power supported by a Multiplication Division Unit (MDU) and up to 32KByte flash memory. The new controllers are ideal for handling motor control together with networking functionality in low- to mid-range industrial and consumer motor control, industrial automation or automotive body applications. To meet the wide-ranging application requirements of the diverse industrial control market, Infineon will offer 40 derivatives of the XC886 and XC888 MCUs to provide best-in-class and to-the-point products. The 40 derivatives differ in package, peripherals, memory size and temperature range.

More details on the XC886 and XC888 microcontroller products are available at www.infineon.com/XC886.

Technical information on the XC164SM and XC164LM microcontrollers (16-bit)

The extensions to the Infineon XC164 family include four new XC164SM microcontrollers and four new XC164LM microcontrollers. The cost-efficient XC164 series, which is operating code compatible with the earlier C166 family, enables an easy upgrade to the well-known C166 family (op-code compatible). The flexible and intelligent PWM unit simplifies motor control tasks. Other main features are a 14-channel ADC, an on-chip TwinCAN module and extended serial interfaces. With its high DSP-level performance offering of 25 ns instruction time, the new microcontroller series is ideal for high-end drives (e.g., for field-oriented control algorithms), automotive body, comfort or safety applications. The XC164SM products offer ADC and PWM, the XC164LM products do not. The respective four derivatives differ in memory size and operating frequency.

Infineon plans to further extend its 16-bit MCU portfolio with devices in the next three months with an even higher optimized peripheral set.

More details on XC164SM microcontrollers and XC164LM microcontrollers are available at www.infineon.com/XC164CM

With the introduction of the TC1166 and TC1165, Infineon further extends its portfolio of 32-bit MCUs designed for use in industrial applications. Both new 32-bit derivatives are high-end members of the TC116x series of 32-bit TriCore™ microcontrollers for industrial drive and control applications, such as multi-axis motion control tasks (e.g., in CNC machines). The new family members offer a performance increase of 66 percent compared to Infineon’s TC1161/1162 microcontrollers. They operate at 80 MHz and in the full industrial temperature range of -40°C to +85°C. On-chip embedded Flash memory was enlarged from 1 Megabyte (MB) to 1.5 MB, allowing designers to use real-time-operating systems together with complex application code.

The rich peripheral set of the TC1166 and the TC1165 includes a flexible timer unit (GPTA) for PWM generation, fast multi-channel ADCs, MultiCAN module (TC1166 only), Asynchronous and Synchronous Serial Interfaces (ASC/SSC) and a Micro Link Interface (MLI) for interfacing to a second controller. The flexible GPTA concept enables scalable motor control solutions and an autonomous full coherent high-speed PWM generation to achieve highly efficient drive operations.

Infineon announced first members of its 32-bit industrial MCU portfolio in December 2005, and plans to further extend the product family with additional variants in the next three months, which will add further choices of available connectivity and memory size.

More details on the TC1165 and TC1166 products are available at www.infineon.com/TC1166  

Samples of the XC886/888 are available now, and production start is planned for Q4 2006. The new 8-bit microcontrollers are shipped in green TQFP-48 and TQFP-64 packages. First devices of the XC164SM and XC164LM are in production now and available in low-cost green TPFQ-64 packages. Samples of the TC1165 and TC1166 devices in green LQFP-176 packages are available now, with volume production scheduled for Q4 2006. Infineon supports development with all new microcontrollers by providing easy-to-use and cost-effective starter kits. A complete development and debugging tool chain and real-time operating systems are available from all leading tool vendors.

Pricing (for quantities of 10,000 pieces):

• XC886/888: Euro 2.25 (about US $2.68) per piece 
• XC164SM: Euro 3.95 (about US $4.70) per piece
• TC1165: Euro 11.40 (about US $13.57) per piece

Glossary

CNC   Computerized Numerical Control