Microchip's New Range of Microcontrollers Microchip's new PIC18CXX range of microcontrollers are a major step forward, offering both increased speed and memory. Microchip Technology Inc. has introduced the world’s first 8-bit RISC microcontroller architecture to provide complete software and hardware design reusability for embedded control engineers. Microchip’s new PIC18CXXX architecture allows the thousands of existing PICmicro® 8-bit RISC microcontroller users to seamlessly migrate their designs to higher integration while maintaining their code investment, engineering knowledge and hardware investment via socket compatibility with existing printed-circuit boards. Microchip will continue to support its current PICmicro architecture along with the new PIC18CXXX architecture. The PIC18CXXX architecture offers up to two million bytes of program memory address space, a C compiler friendly development environment and 8-bit microcontroller industry-leading 10 MIPS performance at 40 MHz. Microchip debuted the first four PIC18CXXX devices, the PIC18C242, PIC18C442, PIC18C252 and PIC18C452 8-bit microcontrollers, and MPLAB™-C18 C Compiler. Microchip plans a suite of new PIC18CXXX devices in the next two years featuring Flash, OTP and ROM memories. The PIC18CXXX architecture is initially being implemented in four microcontroller devices. Current PIC18CXXX microcontrollers feature 16K to 32K bytes of on-chip EPROM (OTP) program memory and 512 bytes to 1536 bytes of data SRAM. Available in 28- and 40-pin configurations, these devices provide various feature sets of 10-bit analog-to-digital converters; capture, compare and pulse-width modulation; and I2C™ , SPI™, and high performance USART communications capability. Future implementations are expected to support the CAN 2.0B specification in 28- to 84-pin devices and support USB in 28- to 40-pin devices. Other planned microcontrollers will feature Flash memory. The company's Web site address is http://www.microchip.com/. [Reprinted with kind permission from Microchip]