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Friday, March 30, 2007

a little fine wordsmithing

I particularly liked this bit of editing I did that ended up in the datasheet for our new part. My edit describes more features, and helps make them more applicable to a user. It's a 50% increase in words, but I'd say it's a 100% feature increase, 100% information improvement, and 15% clarity improvement.
The result:

The built in, pipelined 8051 microcontroller, supported by the integrated development environment and source level debugging, provides enormous versatility. The 20Mhz clock rate, 16KB of code space, 8KB of SRAM, and MME integration library can handle sophisticated algorithms ported from Matlab or C. Three 16 bit timers and configurable GPIO ports can extend data buffering capability or tackle unforeseen issues. Woken by DRDY (data ready) interrupts from the VMC or ROC blocks, by its own timers, or from an external SPI/I2C command, the unit is only powered up when needed. If higher-order curve fitting and matrix/floating-point operations are unnecessary, the MCU never needs to be turned on at all.

The initial text:

An 8051 microcontroller (from CAST) is built-in and includes 16KB of FLASH memory, 20KB of SRAM, three 16 bit timers, and ~8 GPIO ports (actual number is TBD). The unit is only powered up upon request, as the state machines handle most transactions, however the MCU is necessary for higher-order curve fitting and matrix/floating-point operations. The MCU can be woken by DRDY (data ready) interrupts from the VMC or ROC.

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