Microchip has introduced low pin-count, 32bit PIC32 microcontrollers that provide 61 Dhrystone microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages of performance. The MX1 and MX2 microcontrollers feature dedicated audio and capacitive-sensing peripherals and are suitable for applications in the consumer, industrial, medical and automotive markets. Rated for operation up to 105°C, the microcontrollers include up to 32kbyte of flash, and 8kbyte of SRAM; two I2S interfaces for audio processing; the company's charge time measurement unit peripheral for adding mTouch capacitive touch buttons or advanced sensors; and an 8bit parallel master port interface for graphics or external memory. There are also on-chip 10bit, 1Msample/s, a 13-channel ADC, and USB 2.0 and serial-communications peripherals. The microcontrollers are available in eight packages, from 28- to 44-pins, with sizes of 5x5mm and a 0.5mm pitch. The company says that the peripheral pin select feature allows developers to ‘remap' the chip's digital function pins to significantly simplify layout and design modifications. The microcontrollers are compatible with 16bit PIC24F product line, and are supported by the MPLAB X IDE development environment which also supports all of the company's 8-, 16- and 32bit microcontrollers.
