Articles Microcontrollers - 4

This article looks at the role of Microcontrollers (MCUs) in industrial automation, specifically examining how they provide the real-world interface to sensors and actuators. It discusses the need for integrating high-performance cores like ...

Stephen Evanczuk, Electronic Products Digi-Key A tire-pressure-monitoring system (TPMS) provides early warning of abnormal tire pressure or failure. Used separately or in conjunction with other vehicle electronic systems, a TPMS serves an essential ...

Jack Ganssle Digi-Key Part 1 - Overview and features Internal WDTs Watchdogs can be divided into two general categories: those that are on board the processor chip, and external devices added by the hardware designer. Most microcontrollers have an ...

Jack Ganssle Digi-Key A watchdog timer (WDT) is a bit of hardware that monitors the execution of code to reset the processor if the software crashes. For many years there has been a raging debate in the embedded world about their importance. More ...

Atmel AVR lock bits and fuses is one of the topics that may cause some confusion. If you missed something or set one bit wrong, it may lead to failure bricking whole AVR chip. So it is important to understand once and to things right. Despite the ...

There are definitely some hefty words in the title but Texas Instruments (TI) has brought something new to the motor control table with its InstaSpin-FOC (field-oriented-control) solution. It is a combination of hardware and software that supports ...

Volker Rzehak, Texas Instruments Texas Instruments recently announced a new microcontroller family that implements FRAM as non-volatile memory instead of Flash, today's most common programmable, non-volatile memory technology. The paper explains ...

Jack G. Ganssle Embedded Systems Design 64-bit CPUs and VLIW architectures slam massive amounts of data around via wide parallel buses. Processors today are so fast and so hungry for data that chip designers do horrible things to push bits into the ...

Part 1 - NXP Semiconductors LPC4000 - Real-time aids data processing STMicroelectronics STM32 Quick, artful memory STMicroelectronics is another company that soon embraced the ARM Cortex-M3 in microcontrollers with its STM32 product line after ...

Tom Starnes Digi-Key Flash memory completely dominates microcontrollers (MCUs) now, but memory considerations have become more complex as the processors have advanced to 32-bit architectures and peripherals have become much more capable. It is easy ...