DSP, Micros & Memory


Microcontroller families with fully functional DSP capability have high performance specs

13 February 2002 DSP, Micros & Memory

Microchip's dsPIC family of digital signal controllers provides high performance. The devices feature a fully-implemented digital signal processor engine, 30 MIPS nonpipelined performance, a 2,5 to 5,5 V operating range, C compiler friendly design and a familiar microcontroller architecture and design environment. The first 20 dsPIC30Fxxxx devices feature between 12 and 144 KB of on-chip secure flash program memory and up to 8 KB of data memory. dsPIC devices are available in three product families targeting motor control and power conversion, sensor and general-purpose applications. Devices will be available in 18 to 80-pin packages.

The DSP engine features a high-speed 16 x 16 bit multiplier, two 40 bit saturating accumulators and a 16 bit bidirectional barrel shifter. Independent address generation units (AGUs) enable concurrent fetches of two operands for most of the DSP class of instructions. Communications capabilities include combinations of RS485 type UART, I2C, SPI, AC97, CAN and I2S for peripheral expansion. Analog peripherals include 10 bit four-channel high-speed simultaneous sampling ADCs, PWM, capture and compare 12 bit ADCs, programmable brownout detect and programmable low-voltage detect. Low-power operation modes are also available.

Motor control and power conversion family

The first eight dsPIC motor control and power conversion devices feature a 6 or 8-channel motor control pulse-width modulation (PWM) module, a 10 bit high-speed (500 Ksa/s) simultaneous sampling analog-to-digital converter (ADC), quadrature encoder interface (QEI), output compare units, input capture units and communication peripherals. These devices are suited for any motor control or power conversion application, including sensorless brushless DC motors, switched reluctance motors, induction motors, uninterruptible power supplies and power inverters. Some variants include a CAN module for communications in automotive and industrial control applications. Devices are planned in 28, 40, 64 and 80-pin packages.

Every device in the dsPIC motor control and power conversion family contains four to eight input capture units. The capture units can be used to measure velocity from a tachometer wheel or reading Hall-effect sensor outputs for brushless DC motor commutation. All motor control variants in the dsPIC device family contain an SPI interface and one or two UARTs.

Sensor family

With 18 and 28-pin packages, the sensor family targets low-cost applications requiring low pin counts and high processing capability. The first four dsPIC sensor devices provide the computational throughput to support complex filtering algorithms, spectrum, motion and timing window analysis in realtime required for many sensor applications. For high-performance data acquisition, an on-chip 12 bit ADC provides 100 000 samples/s, 8 or 10-input channels and a 16-word conversion FIFO. The FIFO allows multiple data samples to be collected while current data is being processed.

The dsPIC30Fxxxx sensor family devices feature 12 to 24 KB of on-chip secure flash program memory and up to 2 KB of data memory. The devices contain 16 bit timer functionality, input capture, output compare and PWM outputs.

Several communication protocol peripherals are available to support centralised networking and control. Data collected from multiple sensors can be processed by the dsPIC30Fxxxx. A range of serial communication interfaces, such as I2C, SPI and UART, are provided to support a distributed sensor network.

For further information on these products, contact Azona (012) 665 2880, Avnet Kopp (011) 444 2333, Memec SA (021) 674 4103 or Tempe Technologies (011) 452 0530.



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