In April of this year, Microchip announced the release of five new product families and 60 new devices. The market share for PIC and AVR microcontrollers is growing, as the landscape of embedded systems changes. The growth of smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and 5G wireless have dominated embedded design so far in 2022.
The company is meeting the call for more MCUs, over a broader range of needs, developing the 5 families of products with over 60 new individual devices, to offer designers more choices in the market for ways to solve common problems in the field.
Microchip Inc is reporting that many designers who are seeking to create innovative designs with more processing power are looking toward the new line of PIC and AVR MCUs. The microcontrollers are offering the ability to easily communicate with other chips and analog peripherals that are configured to allow such communication, without having to make physical changes to the printed circuit boards, that they have already built.
The devices Microchip has developed combined ASIC-like capabilities with simple development experience, which extends traditional MCUs capabilities. This allows the controllers to be configured as smart peripheral chips.
An example of this way of development is the software-controlled op amp found on the PIC16F171 family of MCUs. The multi-voltage I/O (MVO) and Analog to Digital Converter with Computation (ADCC) add a certain extra value to applications that otherwise would not use a traditional MCU family.
Another issue that can be addressed is the spanning of multiple voltage domains in systems that include chips using different supply voltages (e.g., connecting a 5V MCU to a 1.8V sensor). This would normally require level-shifting hardware to create the proper voltage, which increases costs. The MVIO peripheral on the company’s 8-bit MCUs, which include the AVR DD Family, allows a single port in an MCU, to operate in a different voltage domain than the rest of the MCU, eliminating the need for extra components.
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Microchip also offers a development ecosystem, of hardware and software, that includes MPLAB X and MPLAB Xpress Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and MPLAB Code Configurator (MCC) which is an intuitive graphical interface to generate product-ready setup and application code for 8-bit MCU based projects.
The April 2022 launch was code-named the Mega Launch and the PIC and AVR MCUs datasheets and product pages are accessible from the website or the link
Microchip Technology | microship.com
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