By Miles Budimir, Senior Editor As prices drop and the available number of functions increase, new microcontroller offerings are ready to add smarts to your latest design. Microcontrollers are microprocessor’s strong little cousin. Designed to handle specific control tasks, they are generally easier to program, cost less and require much less engineering support. The first […]
Products
Atmel Extends maXTouch T Series with Touchscreen Controller
Atmel® Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML) announced production of the mXT106xT2 family of devices, expanding the company’s popular maXTouch® T series of touchscreen controllers. The new touchscreen controllers incorporate all of the latest features flagship smartphones have with hover, stylus, superior noise immunity, but now are available in the larger format market for screen sizes of 7 […]
PIC Microcontrollers for Safety Critical Applications
by Chris Francis Microchip recently announced some microcontrollers for “safety critical applications”. I was interested to see what the difference was and how they might compare with other manufacturers’ microcontrollers aimed at similar applications. The first thing I found out was that there don’t seem to be many microcontrollers aimed at safety critical applications. The […]
Replace expensive resolver-to-digital conversion solutions with TI’s new C2000™ MCU
Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) announces its first programmable microcontroller (MCU) solution to handle resolver-to-digital decoding: The C2000™ MCU Resolver Kit. Because the resolver is an analog, rotary electrical transformer, it has historically required an application-specific circuit — which can be costly and space consuming – to convert to digital signals for use by a […]
World’s lowest power microcontrollers now deliver big benefits in tiny packages
Enabling developers to save valuable board space, Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) announced it has expanded the availability of tiny package sizes to several new families of ultra-low power MSP430™ microcontrollers (MCUs). Developers can now design smaller products with TI’s ultra-low power FRAM-based MSP430FR5738 and Flash-based MSP430F51x2 MCUs in wafer-level chip scale packages (WLCSP) as […]
Microchip Introduces Cost-Effective 8-bit PIC® Microcontroller Family
Microchip Technology Inc., a provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced from EE Live! and the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose the PIC16(L)F170X and PIC16(L)F171X family of 8-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), which combine a rich set of intelligent analog and core independent peripherals, along with cost-effective pricing and eXtreme Low Power (XLP) […]
Comparison of the Cypress PSoC 1, 3, 4 and 5LP
By Chris Francis The first generation Cypress PSoC “Programmable System-on-Chip” – PSoC 1 – was the first programmable analog system that was general purpose, flexible and with usable performance in my opinion. Various other companies attempts at programmable analog prior to that were either too restricted, slow or relied solely on switched capacitor analog blocks. […]
Microchip PIC Microcontroller Configurable Logic Cells (CLC)
By Chris Francis Some of the newer Microchip PIC microcontrollers feature “configurable logic cells” or CLC. What are they and how useful are they? They appear in a small selection of the PIC devices and are a programmable combination of gates and latches that can be combined to produce an output. Rather than being a […]
Microchip Updates MPLAB® Device Blocks for Simulink®
Microchip Technology Inc., a provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, announced Version 3.30 of its MPLAB® Device Blocks for Simulink®, which make it easy to develop complex designs using Microchips dsPIC30 and dsPIC33 digital signal controllers (DSCs). This software provides a set of user interfaces to MathWorks Simulink graphical environment for simulation and […]
Atmel and Hillcrest Labs team up on sensor hubs
Atmel and Hillcrest Labs recently announced the expansion of their collaboration in the context of Atmel’s Partner Program to deliver turn-key sensor hub solutions. As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, sensor hubs are increasingly being used to offload sensor management from a main processor. Essentially, the combination of Hillcrest’s SH-1 sensor hub software […]
