Digital signal controllers remove DSP complexity

The dsPIC33 family of digital signal controllers is claimed to offer high levels of performance, memory and I/O without the complexity of traditional digital signal processors.

New from Microchip is the dsPIC33 family of digital signal controllers (DSCs), claimed to offer high levels of performance, memory and I/O without the complexity of traditional digital signal processors.

The dsPIC33 architecture is ideal for embedded control, providing deterministic operation and sustained performance in an interrupt-intensive control environment.

The dsPIC33 family operates at 40MIPS from a 3.3V supply, with up to 256Kbyte of self-programming Flash and up to 30Kbyte of RAM in 64- to 100-pin packages.

The new family of 27 devices, in addition to the 21 existing dsPIC30 products, clearly demonstrates Microchip's commitment to the 16bit market.

The new dsPIC33 family is highly compatible with the existing dsPIC30 family - it has the same instruction set, has compatible pinouts, and uses the same development tools including the MPLAB integrated development environment (IDE) and the MPLAB C30 C compiler - but offers an attractive price and feature-set for applications requiring larger Flash and RAM, where extra I/O is important, or where 3.3V is the preferred chip voltage.

The two initial dsPIC33 product families (general purpose DSCs and motor control and power conversion DSCs) share the following key features: 40MIPS deterministic performance; 3.3V operation; 64 to 256Kbyte Flash; 8 to 30Kbyte RAM; 64- to 100-pin TQFP packages; serial I/O subsystems, including up to two each of SPI, I2C, UART and CAN; and direct memory access (DMA).

The general-purpose DSCs are ideal for a broad range of applications, including speech and audio, soft modem, security and medical products.

15 dsPIC33 general-purpose devices are being announced at this time, and include: one or two 500Ksample/s 12bit A/D convertors and a codec interface.

The 12 dsPIC33 motor-control and power-conversion devices are targeted at a range of motor control and power conversion applications, such as washing machines, electronic power steering, environmental control, uninterruptible power supplies, inverters and LED lighting arrays.

The key features of this family include: one or two 1.1Msample/s 10bit A/D convertors; up to eight sample-and-holds for simultaneous sampling; specialised PWM for motor-control, lighting and power-conversion applications; and a quadrature encoder interface.

Within the MPLAB IDE, high-level resources have been added to allow the DSC features to be used with minimal effort.

These include Microchip's Visual Device Initialiser, which can generate initialisation code in a few clicks, and the Motor Control GUI, which can be used to quickly tune dsPIC DSC motor control libraries to a specific motor type.

In addition, sophisticated libraries have been developed that fully exploit the dsPIC DSC's capabilities while presenting a user-friendly environment for engineers.

Many of these libraries are free, while others can be licensed for a small one-time fee.

To assist with the use of digital filters, the low-cost Digital Filter Designer and the free dsPICworks software can help users define filters to their specifications, simulate performance and generate code, all without the need for extensive DSP expertise.

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