Essential Selection Tips for MCUs in Modern System Designs

In this submission from Mouser Electronics, Mark Patrick gives seven key things to think about when looking at MCU options – that should help reveal which products in the catalogue will best meet your particular needs.

Rutronik Elektronische Bauelemente GmbH and AP Memory Technology Corp. have entered into a global distribution agreement. The agreement encompasses all of AP Memory’s products and is already in effect. As a result of this partnership, Rutronik is the sole distributor of AP Memory IoT RAM products in the European market.

When Atmel was acquired by Microchip a little over two years ago many users of Atmel devices voiced concern over the future for its products. The company has recently announced that the latest version of its Microchip MPLAB X IDE can now support Atmel controllers. For now, the support is still in its beta version and Microchip has emphasized that it intends to further develop and support the IDE Atmel Studio 7 for existing and future AVR MCUs but it seems as though its future demise is inevitable...

Whether it’s used as an initial introduction into embedded development, the main controller of a connected application or as an attach component to offload tasks from a larger system, the role of the 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) continues to expand. While inherently simple to understand and implement, additional hardware and software tools, such as Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs), Intelligent Analog and MPLAB® Code Configurator, enable greater processing power while decreasing the amount of code, power consumption and design effort needed to get to market quickly.

Almost ervery developer faces one day the situation that his (or her) uC project grows and finally runs out of port pins. In this case there are basically two possible solutions feasible. Either take a bigger uC or use some kind of port expander. If one would like to avoid a bigger uC you have a large number of solutions for port expanding on the market.

Almost ervery developer faces one day the situation that his (or her) uC project grows and finally runs out of port pins. In this case there are basically two possible solutions feasible. Either take a bigger uC or use some kind of port expander. If one would like to avoid a bigger uC you have a large number of solutions for port expanding on the market.

The modul RFM12 from HopeRF is a cheap transceiver, which operates in the 433 Mhz and 868 Mhz frequency band. Base of my implementation is the C-code of HopeRF, which is published in the attached PDF file.

The modul RFM12 from HopeRF is a cheap transceiver, which operates in the 433 Mhz and 868 Mhz frequency band. Base of my implementation is the C-code of HopeRF, which is published in the attached PDF file.

This Pic developmentboard, which still needs a new name, is 'based' on a arduino.An arduino is a little board with a microcontroller on it (usualy 2, 1 for programming and 1 for for learning/developing/etc).Most pic development board need an external programmer,