16-Bit Micro Handles Mobile Graphics and Multitouch Input

June 23, 2010

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16-MHz PIC24FJ256DA

Microchip’s 16-MHz PIC24FJ256DA microcontroller family mixes three accelerated graphics controllers with 24-channel mTouch multitouch inputs. The chip handles resolutions up to 640 by 480, and the controller has a color lookup table. The 16-bit PIC family supports up to 96 kbytes of RAM and 256 kbytes of flash. The multitouch support is implemented using 10-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The chip also has three comparators, two DMA channels, five timers, nine pulse-width modulation (PWM) timers, four serial ports, three serial peripheral interface (SPI) ports, and three I2C ports. The Full Speed USB 2.0 port can be a host, peripheral, or On-The-Go (OTG) support. The development kit is priced at $399. It includes a QVGA LCD and a development board with USB and capacitive touch pads. Microchip’s ICD-3 and MPLAB integrated development system both support the board.

Microchip

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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