Electronics Weekly
There are 16 of them to implement 16 power rails, plus eight 16bit 1.25ns PWMs.
The family, dsPIC33AK512MPS512, combines these PWMs with five of the company’s recent 12Bit 40Msample/s ADCs and backs them up with a 200MHz 32bit processing core, 512kbyte of flash, double-precision floating-point and DSP capabilities – the latter with single-cycle MAC operations.
These “devices enable the implementation of computation-intensive control algorithms for improved energy efficiency in motor control, AI server power supplies, energy storage systems and complex sensor signal processing with machine learning based inferencing”, according to Microchip.
For implementing buck, boost and buck-boost dc-dc converter current loops, eight copies of a peripheral are implemented that include a 5ns comparator, a pulse density modulation DAC and a slope compensation unit – the slope unit available to avoid sub-harmonic oscillation under peak current mode control.
The company has created two more new peripheals for this product line, it told Electronics Weekly: a cryptographic accelerator and a touch controller.
The accelerator is combined with secured boot and a flash memory protection module for secure firmware upgrades, secure debug and other anti-hacking features.
Towards functional safety qualification, hardware is built for ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 compliance.
Operation is over 3 to 3.6V and -40 to +85°C (+125°C and +150°C parts are planned).
VQFN, TQFP and TFBGA packages are available from 40 to up to 128pads.
A related family for multi-motor control, dsPIC33AK512MC, has half the number of DACs (4x), drops the crypto accelerator and touch controller, and still has 24 PWMs, but all 16bit 1.25ns types. VQFN and TQFP packages up to 100 pins will be available, but no TFBGA option.
Find the dsPIC33AK512MPS512 family on this Microchip web page.
In January, EPC released a GaN-based brushless dc motor driver evaluation board specifically aiming at designers of humanoid robots, which offered a dsPIC33 processor control option
