Microchip announced the new AVR DA family of microcontrollers (MCUs), its first Functional Safety Ready AVR MCU family with Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC). The Functional safety ready designation is applied to devices that incorporate the latest safety features and are supported by safety manuals, Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) reports, and in some cases, diagnostic software – reducing the time and cost of certifying safety end applications.
The AVR DA MCU family has been designed with various safety functions for robust operation and with features to ensure sufficient supply voltage such as power on rest, brownout detector, and voltage-level monitor. The cyclic redundancy check (CRC) scan ensures the application code in the flash memory is valid, unintended, and potentially unsafe behavior of the application can be avoided by ensuring code integrity.
The new AVR DA family of MCUs is designed with CPU speeds of 24 MHz over the full supply voltage range, memory density of up to 128 KB flash, 16 KB SRAM and 512 bytes of EEPROM, 12-bit differential ADC, 10-bit DAC, analog comparators and zero-cross detectors. The MCUs support up to 46 self-capacitance and 529 mutual capacitive touch channels and features the latest generation PTC with driven shield+ and boost mode technologies to provide enhanced noise immunity, water tolerance, touch sensitivity, and response time.
The designers can enable the setup of logical functions internally with the configurable custom logic peripherals, this eliminates the need for external components and reduces board space and bill of material costs. The 12-bit differential ADC of the AVR DA family of MCUs can measure small-amplitude signals in noisy environments hence they are suitable for sensor node applications in harsh environments.
The PTC enables capacitive touch interface designs supporting buttons, sliders, wheels, touchpads, smaller touch screens as well as gesture controls used in a wide range of consumer and industrial products and vehicles. The AVR DA family of MCUs’ high memory density and SRAM-to-flash ratio make it attractive for both wireless and wired connected sensors nodes as well as other stack-intensive applications.
