Microchip has announced a new addition to its PIC12/16LF155X 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) family with the PIC16LF1554 and PIC16LF1559 (PIC16LF1554/9) devices. The PIC16LF1554/9 includes two independent 10-bit 100K samples per second Analogue-to-Digital Converters (ADC) with hardware Capacitive Voltage Divider (CVD) support for capacitive-touch sensing. This ADC configuration enables more efficient sensor acquisition and assists with advanced touch-sensing techniques for extremely noisy environments, low-power applications, matrix keypads and water-resistant designs.
The 14- and 20-pin PIC16LF1554/9 MCUs combine up to 17 ADC channels with automated hardware CVD modules to implement capacitive sensing and other front-end sampling applications with minimal software overhead. In particular, the hardware CVD reduces the code for implementing capacitive touch-sensing by more than 40%. The devices also include up to 14 KB Flash/512 Bytes RAM, a 32 MHz internal oscillator and two PWM modules, as well as I2C, SPI and EUSART for communications. Additionally, they are eXtreme Low Power (XLP) compliant with active and sleep currents of 35 µA/MHz and 30 nA, respectively, for applications where energy conservation is paramount. These features, combined with the low cost and small footprint of the PIC16LF1554/9, make them suitable for a wide range of applications in consumer electronics, such as remote controls, audio players, cell phone accessories, small appliances, wearable devices including headphones, watches and fitness wristbands; in medical applications such as blood-pressure monitors and wearable heart-rate monitors; in the automotive market for automotive interior controls and control panels; and in industrial markets such as RFID and sensors; as well as other in applications.
Microchip’s full suite of development tools support the PIC16LF1554/9 MCUs, including the MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment (IDE); PICkit 3 (PG164130) priced at $44.95; MPLAB XC8 Compiler for 8-bit PIC MCUs and MPLAB Code Configurator.
The PIC16LF1554 MCUs are available now for sampling and production in 14-pin PDIP, TSSOP, SOIC and 16-pin QFN (4 x 4 x .9 mm) packages. The PIC16LF1559 MCUs are available now for sampling and production in 20-pin PDIP, SSOP and QFN (4 x 4 x .9 mm) packages.
