In 1979 Motorola brought out its 16-bit offering called the 68000 and its eight-bit data bus version, the 68008 MPU. However, internally it was 32-bit, and this has provided compatibility right up to the 68060 introduced in 1995 and ColdFire RISC device launched in 1997. With a much smaller eight-bit customer base to worry about, the 68000 MPU was an entirely new design and technically much in advance of its 80X86 rivals.
The 68000 was adopted by Apple for its Macintosh series of PCs. However, the Apple Mac only accounts for less than 5% of PC sales. Motorola MPUs have been much more successful in the embedded microprocessor market, the area of smart instrumentation from egg timers to aircraft management systems. Of course, this is just the area which MPUs were developed for in the first place, and the number, if not the profile and value, of devices sold for this purpose exceeds those for computers by more than an order of magnitude.
In this applications area an MPU is ‘buried’ in the application circuit together with memory and various input and output interface circuits. The MPU with its program acts as the controller of the system by virtue of the software in program memory. Over 3.5 billion microprocessor and related devices are sold each year for embedded control, making up over 90% of the MPU market.
The second way of using the additional integrated circuit complexity that became available by the end of the 1970s was to keep a relatively simple CPU and use the extra silicon ‘real estate’ to implement on-board memory and input/output interface. In doing so, simple embedded control systems on the one chip became possible and the overall chip count to implement a given function was thereby considerably reduced. The majority of control tasks require relatively little computing power, but the reduction in size (and therefore cost) is vital. A simple example of this is the intelligent smart card, which has a processor integrated into the card itself. Such microprocessor-based devices were called MicroController Units (MCUs).13 For example there are about 100 microcontrollers hidden in every home; in the washing machine, microwave oven, telephones, electronic games and so on. About 20 more lurk in the average family car.14
