Microchip has introduced a family of low power 16-bit microcontrollers with USB functionality and capacitive touch sensing.
The PIC24 devices incorporate the company’s nanoWatt XLP technology which provides low sleep mode currents down to 20nA.
Microchip has combined this low power operation with USB peripherals. “The result is the lowest power consumption for a MCU with USB OTG,” said the supplier.
Typically USB 2.0 OTG controllers can be higher power 32-bit MCUs.
See: PIC32 expands connectivity support
The PIC24FJ64GB004 has a complete Full-Speed USB 2.0 peripheral, embedded host and OTG functionality.
There is also a general purpose MCU, the PIC24FJ64GA104, offering 16MIPS performance, 32 or 64kbyte of flash, 8kbyte of RAM, a capacitive touch sensing peripheral, a 10-bit A/D, and the ability to reconfigure digital I/O pins via Peripheral Pin Select.
Both families are available in 28-pin QFN, SOIC and PDIP packages, and 44-pin QFN and TQFP packages.
An Explorer 16 Development Board PIM (plug-in module) is available for $25 for each of the new MCU families and a USB PICtail Plus Daughter Board costing $60 is available to enable USB development with the PIC24FJ64GB004 family, using the Microchip Explorer 16 board.