Low pin count MCUs/DSCs

Microchip has announced 30 28- and 44-pin, 16-bit devices for embedded system designers requiring increased memory or performance or enhanced peripherals.

Released are 10 PIC24H family 40 MIPS 16-bit microcontrollers, 10 dsPIC33 family general-purpose DSCs and 10 dsPIC33 motor control and power conversion family DSCs.

These 28- and 44-pin devices offer 32, 64 or 128 KB of programmable flash memory; up to 2 KB of dual-port RAM; 4 to 16 KB of SRAM including DMA; two on-chip comparators; a user-selectable 10-bit (4 S&H) or 12-bit (1 S&H) ADC; a real-time clock and calendar. Standard serial peripherals include two SPIs, two UARTs and one I²C module.

Selected DSCs include a 16-bit peripheral — a dual-channel, 16-bit audio DAC. Some devices also offer an on-chip CAN 2.0B module and a CODEC interface supporting the I²S and AC’97 protocols.

All three families are offered in packages as small as 6 x 6 mm. All devices also operate at up to 40 MIPS, making the PIC24H the industry’s claimed highest performing device.

The devices also feature a parallel master port for rapid parallel communication with off-chip resources, such as displays, communication peripherals or memory. The on-chip peripheral pin select (PPS) feature permits digital peripherals to be remapped to other pins to achieve layout efficiency or access to pin-multiplexed peripherals.