Motorola/

Freescale Semiconductor Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, em ...

's DragonBall, or MC68328, is a microcontroller design based on the famous

68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

core, but implemented as an all-in-one low-power system for

handheld computer A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physical k ...

use. It is supported by

μClinux μClinux is a variation of the Linux kernel, previously maintained as a fork, that targets microcontrollers without a memory management unit (MMU). It was integrated into the mainline kernel as of 2.5.46; the project continues to develop patch ...

. It was designed by Motorola in Hong Kong and released in 1995. The DragonBall's major design win was in numerous devices running the Palm OS platform. However, from

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provi ...

5 onwards their use was superseded by

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

-based processors from Texas Instruments and Intel. The processor is capable of speeds of up to 16.58

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

and can run up to 2.7 MIPS ( million instructions per second), for the base 68328 and DragonBall EZ (MC68EZ328) model. It was extended to 33 MHz, 5.4 MIPS for the DragonBall VZ (MC68VZ328) model, and 66 MHz, 10.8 MIPS for the DragonBall Super VZ (MC68SZ328). It is a 32-bit processor with 32-bit internal and external address bus (24-bit external address bus for EZ and VZ variants) and 32-bit data bus. It has many built-in functions, like a color and grayscale display controller,

PC speaker A PC speaker is a loudspeaker built into some IBM PC compatible computers. The first IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, employed a standard 2.25 inch magnetic driven (dynamic) speaker. More recent computers use a tiny moving-iron or pie ...

sound, serial port with UART and IRDA support, UART bootstrap, real time clock, is able to directly access DRAM, Flash ROM, mask ROM, and has built-in support for touch screens. The more recent DragonBall MX series microcontrollers, later renamed the Freescale

i.MX The i.MX range is a family of Freescale Semiconductor (now part of NXP) proprietary microcontrollers for multimedia applications based on the ARM architecture and focused on low-power consumption. The i.MX application processors are SoCs (Syste ...

(MC9328MX/MCIMX) series, are intended for similar application to the earlier DragonBall devices but are based on an

processor core instead of a 68000 core.

References

68k microprocessors Science and technology in Hong Kong Computer-related introductions in 1995 {{HongKong-stub