Two microcontrollers, the LPC11D00 and LPC12D00, from NXP Semiconductors, are claimed to be the first ARM Cortex-M0 microcontrollers with integrated segment LCD drivers. The company claims that this enables high contrast and brightness in a single chip. Both microcontrollers feature the company's PCF876D LCD driver and are capable of driving static or multiplexed LCDs containing up to four backplanes and 40 segments. They can be cascaded with multiple segment LCD drivers to accommodate up to 2560 segments for larger displays. The PCF8576D LCD driver support LCD supply from 2.5 to 6.5V, making the microcontrollers suitable to interface with both low-threshold and high-threshold LCDs. They integrate on-chip display RAM and versatile blinking modes. For alternate messages to be displayed, data is sent from the microcontroller and stored in the 40x4bit on-chip display RAM which supports direct mapping to the LCD elements on the display. The LPC11D00 supports up to 32kbyte of Flash, 8kbyte of SRAM and offers a rich peripheral set, including two SSPs, I2C (FM+), UART, four- system timers and an eight-channel, 10bit ADC. The LPC12D00 additionally has up to 128kbyte of Flash and analogue peripherals such as dual analogue comparators with 32 levels of voltage reference and output feedback loop.
