07-05-2020 | Microchip Technology | Semiconductors
Microchip Technology announced its next-generation AVR DA family of MCUs – its first Functional Safety Ready AVR MCU family with PTC.
“With this AVR DA family of microcontrollers Microchip builds on our legacy of high performance and high code efficiency devices, now meeting new demand across multiple industries with advanced analog and core independent peripherals, and more capacitive touch channels over existing devices,” said Greg Robinson, associate vice president of marketing, 8-bit microcontroller business unit. “The technology spans applications from connected home security, building automation and sensor systems to automotive and industrial automation, enabling the designs of more robust, accurate and responsive applications.”
The company's Functional Safety Ready designation is applied to devices that include the latest safety features and are supported by safety manuals, FMEDA reports, and in some cases, diagnostic software – decreasing the time and expense of certifying safety end applications. The family incorporates several integrated safety functions to ensure robust operation – features ensuring an adequate supply voltage such as power-on reset, brown-out detector and voltage-level monitor. The CRC scan ensures the application code in the flash memory is valid. By assuring code integrity, unintended and possibly unsafe behaviour of the application can be evaded.
The company's new family of MCUs enable CPU speeds of 24MHz over the full supply voltage range, memory density of up to 128KB flash, 16KB SRAM and 512bytes of EEPROM, 12-bit differential ADC, 10-bit DAC, analog comparators and zero-cross detectors.
The PTC enables capacitive touch interface designs supporting buttons, wheels, touchpads, sliders, smaller touch screens as well as gesture controls employed in a broad range of consumer and industrial products and vehicles. The family of MCUs is supporting up to 46 self-capacitance and 529 mutual capacitive touch channels and highlights the latest generation PTC with Driven Shield+ and boost mode technologies giving enhanced noise immunity, water tolerance, touch sensitivity and response time.
With the new advanced analog features such as the 12-bit differential ADC, the MCUs can measure small amplitude signals in noisy environments, making them ideal for sensor node applications in harsh environments.
The MCUs’ high memory density and SRAM-to-flash ratio make it interesting for both wireless and wired connected sensors nodes, as well as other stack-intensive applications.
