PIC® and AVR® Microcontrollers Anchor the Majority of Embedded Designs Today

With smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and 5G wireless connectivity dominating the landscape of embedded design in 2022, Microchip’s 8-bit PIC® and AVR® microcontroller (MCU) families are gaining market share. Over the past 50 years, the market for 8-bit MCUs has grown steadily and Microchip currently sells one device for every human in the western hemisphere each year. To support this ongoing trend, Microchip Technology announces the release of five new product families and over 60 new individual devices that offer embedded designers simple solutions to their most common problems.

Designers who are looking to create innovative designs are turning to Microchip’s new product families of PIC and AVR MCUs because of their processing power, ability to easily communicate with other chips, and analog peripherals that have been built to be exceptionally configurable without having to make changes to the Printed Circuit Board (PCB). These devices combine ASIC-like capabilities with a simple development experience that extends traditional MCU capabilities and allows them to be configured as smart peripheral chips. Smart peripherals, like the software-controlled op amp found on the PIC16F171 family, the Multi-Voltage I/O (MVIO) and Analog-to-Digital Converter with Computation (ADCC) add value to applications that otherwise would not use traditional MCUs.

The challenge of spanning multiple voltage domains is a common situation in systems that include chips using different supply voltages (e.g., connecting a 5V MCU to a 1.8V sensor). This type of system would normally require level-shifting hardware, which increases costs. The MVIO peripheral found on Microchip’s latest 8-bit MCUs, including the AVR DD family, allows a single port on the MCU to operate in a different voltage domain than the rest of the MCU, which eliminates the need for additional external components (more info).