New Arm-based MCUs include Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity
Microchip has introduced its first Arm® Cortex®-M4F-based PIC microcontroller family to provide built-in Bluetooth® Low Energy connectivity. The PIC32CX-BZ2 MCU family offers excellent analog performance and comprehensive design support alongside wireless functionality.
The new PIC32CX-BZ2 MCU family is backed by a comprehensive ecosystem for developing both wireless functionality and the host application. The use of a PIC MCU with built-in Bluetooth connectivity both helps OEMs to achieve regulatory certification, and assures them of long-term supply of a critical element of system functionality.
The Microchip PIC32CX-BZ2 family is comprised of both system-on-chip (SoC) devices and complete modules supplied with certificates of compliance with global regulations. The PIC32CX1012BZ25048-I and PIC32CX1012BZ25048-E SoCs are supplied in a 48-lead, 7 mm x 7 mm QFN package. The WBZ451PE-I module includes a PCB antenna, and the WBZ451UE-I module has a u.FL connector for an external antenna.
Alongside the PIC32CX-BZ2 Bluetooth Low Energy functionality, the MCUs also include Zigbee wireless stacks and over-the-air (OTA) update capabilities. Hardware features include an eight-channel, 12-bit analog to digital converter ADC, multiple timers/counters for control channels, an on-board AES encryption engine, and a broad set of interfaces to touch-sensing, CAN, sensor, display and other peripherals.
The 1 Mbyte of Flash memory in the MCU is sufficient to store large application code bases, as well as multi-protocol wireless stacks and OTA updates.
Development on the PIC32CX-BZ2 MCU family is supported by the MPLAB® Harmony 32-bit embedded software development framework. MPLAB Code Configurator integration enables developers to quickly begin prototyping with the PIC32CX-BZ2 family using drag-and-drop automatic code generation. Numerous application code examples are hosted on GitHub.