 Hi, I'm IMPI. All right, IMPI, brought to you by DigiCaneAge. For this week, it is Microchip. Lady, what is this week's IMPI? I'm glad you asked. You know what's funny is I don't think we've done Microchip chips before. We've done some Microchip other sensors and products. But this, I think, is the first Microchip, or at least AVR chip, that we've covered on IMPI. Because we haven't used AVR chips. I mean, we use them all the time. But we haven't really talked about new ones as much. But there has been a lot of innovations in the 8-bit AVR microcontroller line from Microchip. And there's a new series that came out. And so I wanted to check it out. It's the DD series, the Microchip DD. Now, just to be clear, it says AVR 64. It's not 64-bit. That's just the size of the flash. And then DD is the series. And then 32 is the number of pins in this package. In this case, it's a 32-pin QFN. So what is this? It's an 8-bit micro. So if you're used to AVR microcontrollers, like the AT-Tiny or Mega328, this will be familiar. They run up to 64 megahertz. And again, it's one instruction per clock cycle. Some of them aren't, but many of them are, including a hardware multiply, which is a two-cycle hardware multiplier, runs at 24 megahertz, 1632, 64K of flash, 248K of RAM, the bigger, the more expensive, et cetera. And of course, there's EEPROM, there's also NVRAM. And they come in all sorts of different packages from 14 to 32-pin, including a 28-dip, which is quite brave of them to come up with a dip chip of a new microcontroller these days. But if you're used to using risk chipsets like Risk 5 or ARM Cortex, you might be like, well, why would I want to go backwards to an AVR 8-bit? Well, one thing is simplicity. I mean, there was nothing as easy as controlling an AVR. You could really just put in register command. You didn't have to worry about locking the bus or muxing this or this controller affected that. I mean, it's very simple. It's very straightforward. It's very fast. Your interrupts will go off very quickly because there isn't. There's not as much sharing of this back-end resource I found. They're very inexpensive because you're not paying the ARM licensing fee. And there's actually a surprising, a lot of people, they only move to maybe a 32-bit processor, not because they need literally the amount of speed or the number of bits in a multiplier ad. But because they need all the peripherals. But there's some really cool peripherals. So we'll go over those in a second. So there's a bunch in the family. What I do like is that Microchip has kind of done a very standardized way of how many pins, how much flash, and memory. And they made this little grid where it's like, you can kind of get any config in anything. Obviously, you're going to get more timers when you have more pins. And I think there's two underlying dies. So basically, you pick your number of pins, and you pick the amount of flash. And you're mostly paying for flash memory. And the SRAM increases with it as well. So there's a range. Not all the more in stock right now or released right now. So these are the families. Basically, you double the flash, you double the RAM. E-Prom stays the same. And the NVM memory stays the same. OK, so on to the peripherals. So there's some cool things. So it's running at 24 megahertz, which is a little faster than the standard, like 16 or 8 that I'm used to. But it's got five timers, four 16-bit, sorry. Yeah, four 16-bit timers and a 12-bit timer. There's two UARTs, two hardware UARTs. You can use one for debugging. And then you can use one for different hardware. You can have two hardware UARTs because you have this. It's really, if you don't have a UART, you can't bit bang a UART very easily. There's SPI, there's I squared C. There is a 12-bit ADC. So usually it's 10-bit, but this one is 12, which is quite nice. That's as good as you're going to get on a Cortex. And it's multiplexed to just about all the pins. I mean, on the 14, half the GPIO have ADC on them, 23 on the 32-pin, seven on the 14. There's a 10-bit DAC, which is cool. There's the analog component zero detector. These do not have the peripheral touch controller. You can kind of fake it with a one mega ohm resistor and they don't have an op amp. They do have two cool things, the CCL LUT and the MVIO. And the CCL LUT is interesting. I think I forgot to add of images. Actually, yeah, sorry, the next image is the CCL LUT. So let's go to the CCL LUT. So it's kind of like a micro CPLD. And you can kind of make like a Manchester encoder or you can make an SRL LUT. You basically get like three or four different modules. And each one has like a logic lookup table. So you can turn it into any kind of gate and then you can take events or interrupts and be like, OK, this interrupt, X or that interrupt, I want to generate a third interrupt or something. Or I want that to come in. So this GPIO triggers this or triggers that. So it's interesting. If you would normally have an external piece of logic that just kind of helps you do a little bit of glue, it's built into the chips now. And I think it's probably handy when you're just doing like counter, timers, motor control, interrupt manipulation where you want only trigger on this when not this interrupt, et cetera. So instead of doing that in software, which is slow, you can do the instantaneously in hardware with these logic lookup tables. The other thing that's cool, and I haven't seen that CCL LUT I've seen before, but the MVIO is new and interesting. So it's a way of basically having two voltage domains for your microcontroller. So what you normally have is like, let's say you have a five-volt MCU. Like these MCUs run up to five volts. And you need five volts because you're doing some CAN bus stuff or you're interfacing with hardware that needs to be five volts. And you want a three-volt sensor will usually use a logic level shifter, right? Or use an iSport C shifter, use some FETs and some pull-ups. And that works fine, but now your board's gotten bigger. It's more complicated. The voluntarily has gone up. What this system does, and there's some code that shows what it looks like, is you basically have a separate VDDIO2. And it can be higher or lower than the core voltage in here. It's 1.8, but it could be 1.2-3, or 1.2-5, or 5-3, or 5-2, whatever. And then there's one port for the GPIO that could be iSport C, SPI, UR, or just plain GPIO. And that port can run on the second voltage. And it's completely logic safe for that voltage. So for example, instead of losing a logic level shifter, you run your core at 3.3 volts. Some stuff is at 3. And then you have an LCD, a lot of LCD modules. They want to have 5-volt logic and power, not a problem. You give it that second 5-volt power supply, and you don't have to worry about logic level shifting. Likewise, you can go the other way. You have a 5-volt core. You want to connect to a 3-volt sensor. Not a problem. You use the MVIO. You set that port up to be 3.3 volt, and you talk to the sensor at that logic level. So pretty neat. And there's a, I kind of just love this diagram. There's like no logic level shifter. You do it all in. So check out TB3287. That's the app note on how to get started with this. It doesn't generate the voltage on its own. You do have to supply the voltage. So you do need to have the power supply, but you probably need that anyways to power the sensor. So you have enough current for the sensor. And here's the best part. All this is in stock. Yes, you can actually buy it. And it's pretty affordable. So these chips, oh, it's going to go back. Sorry. These chips are unit 1. They're about $1.25 to $1.60 in quantity 100, which is kind of the standard pre-manufacturing quantity for microchip. They get down to $1. So these are a lot more memory, a lot more timers, especially if you're always hungry for timers. And there's never enough. These are a great upgrade from you're at Megas, maybe some X-Megas even, AT-Tinies. Swap them in with this, and you'll be happy. You can also get a dev board. I'll show it off really quickly if people want to see it. But it's basically Curiosity Nano. I like these dev boards because they're breadboard friendly. And they've got the little debugging interface as well. And the debugging interface usually has serial as well. But these are nice. It uses UPDI, by the way, for programming and debugging. This is a great way to get all the GPIO. It's cast-related, but you can also breadboard it up. And there's a tutorial on using this with the, you can see VDI02 here, so you can use that if you want to test out the MVIO preferable we just chatted about. And finally, there is support in MPLAB, of course, which is the microchip slash AVR IDE. But if you want to use Arduino, Spence Conde, who has some really great AVR and mega teeny cores, he's either added or is in the process right now of adding DD series, as he says. They've done the DD parts are shipping. So they picked up a couple of different chips and they're adding support. So you'll see that if you want to use Arduino core that could be interesting mix to mix Arduino with this kind of new peripheral chip. Viblon Digi-Key, it's really in stock 537 at the time of this printing, by printing I mean screech awning. And here's a little short video. The AVR DD family is microchip's latest addition to our portfolio of 8-bit AVR microcontrollers. Whether you're designing a household appliance, a robust controller board for a factory application, or an extremely low-power IoT sensor node connected to a device on the other side of the planet, the AVR DD product family makes it easy to prototype and get your product to market faster. The family features high performance devices with large memories that are available in low pin count packages. They offer extremely low power consumption to increase battery life in portable applications. These MCUs are also excellent options for safety critical and secure applications that require small form factor solutions. They offer noteworthy analog and real-time control capabilities, including a 12-bit differential ADC in a small 14-pin package. Other key features include a user-configurable event system, configurable custom logic, and many other core independent peripherals so you can easily customize your design. This microcontroller family is available in 14, 20, 28, and 32 pins in SOIC, SPDIP, VQFN, and TQFP packages with 16, 32, and 64 kilobytes of flash memory available in each of these packages. Hi, I'm NPR.