Tiny DSC Targets Sensors

July 19, 2007

Microchip is pushing small (6 by 6 mm) digital signal controller (DSC) chips out the door to tackle intelligent sensor applications. The 40 MIPS dsPIC33FJ12GP family is compatible with its larger brethren but pares down memory to 12 kbytes of flash and 1 kbyte of RAM. The 18- and 28-pin packages start at $1.99. The DSCs also have a 10-channel analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) with a 10-bit or12-bit mode. The 10-bit mode-enables simultaneous sampling that can eliminate the lag time between samples. Other peripherals include a UART, an SPI port, and an I²C port. Peripheral ports can be mapped to any pin using the Peripheral Pin Select support. The chip works with the Digital Filter Design tool and dsPICworks.
www.microchip.com

See Associated Figure

About the Author

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

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

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.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.