Top Stories Microchip Technology Announces Product Families for dsPIC Digital Signal Controllers New exciting product family for PIC developers, Microchip Technology Inc. today announced its family strategy for the first 16-bit digital signal controllers based on its new dsPIC architecture. Planned for volume production in 2002, more than 20 initial devices are expected to populate three new product families. “Microchip intends to dominate the high-performance digital signal controller market—and to accomplish this goal we plan to quickly fill multiple product families with various dsPIC solutions,” said Steve Sanghi, Microchip’s CEO and president. “Microchip is using the same proven strategies for its PICmicro microcontrollers in support of the dsPIC initiative, consisting of sophisticated development tools, application libraries, field applications engineering support and comprehensive technical documentation.” Three families are planned, including a power conversion and motor control family of dsPIC devices, which feature powerful pulse-width modulation for sensorless brushless DC motors, switched reluctance motors, inductive motors, uninterruptible power supplies and inverters. A second dsPIC family is expected to target sensor applications requiring low pin counts and high processing capability. A general-purpose family will be introduced which feature devices ranging in pin counts of 28-100 pins. Applications that can utilize the advantages of the dsPIC devices include: motor control (sensorless brushless DC, switched reluctance, and induction motors), Internet-connected appliances, automotive products (air bags, body computers, drive by wire, noise reduction, active vibration control), feature telephones (caller ID, echo/noise cancellation, DTMF), digital answering machines (speech compression), low-speed software modems, line card (echo cancellation), POS terminals (encryption, software modem for dial-up), vending machines (software modem, recognition events), biometric security (such as finger print recognition), uninterruptible power supplies, power supply management and natural I/O (speech recognition systems). Microchip is developing libraries to support many of these applications. The company's Web site address is http://www.microchip.com/. [Reprinted with kind permission from Microchip]

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