Air Contact Hardware Manual
10
5 Microcontroller
The design of the Air Contact is a typical embedded control application that demands for the usage of a
microcontroller. The choosen microcontroller should fulfil following requirements:
• high level system integration
• eliminate the need for additional peripheral devices
• provide system security and fail-safe mechanisms
• provide effective means to control and reduce the power consumption
For this reason the Infineon C164CI microcontroller is chosen. This microcontroller is a member of the
successful 166-family. The 166-family are 16-bit oriented microcontrollers that offer a wide range of
different types beginning from a small low cost up to a high integrated type. This family of microcontrollers
was also distributed by ST Thomson but not all types are available from them. The fact that these
microcontrollers are used in different industrial and automotive applications as well makes possible that a
lot of software and development tools are available on the market.
The Infineon microcontroller C164CI has following basic feature:
• High performance 16-bit CPU core
• Control oriented instruction set with high efficiency (bit, byte and word data types)
• Internal 2kByte RAM
• External bus interface (8-bit in the ELEKTRONIKON® MkIV application)
• flexible interrupt system with different priority levels
• 10-bit A/D converter
• CAN controller
• Asynchronous Serial Interface
• Synchronous Serial Interface
• Watchdog
• General purpose timer unit
• I/O lines with individual bit addressability
• internal PLL
The Infineon microcontroller C164CI is the core component in the Main Controller design. Around the
C164CI external RAM, Flash EPROM, LCD-Display, I/O’s and all communication interfaces (CAN-Bus,
RS485, I2C-Bus) are provided. For all Main Controller the identical fundamental core design is used and
they differ only in the peripherals.