What’s new in microcontrollers for sensing?

At Sensors Expo 2018, Jason Wellman from the 8-bit marketing division at Microchip Technology demonstrates the noise improvement and other capabilities of the advanced analog to digital converter (ADC) on the company’s recently introduced ATmega4809 microcontrollers (MCU). As a Core Independent Peripheral (CIP), the ADC filters and averages random noise as well as periodic noise without taxing the computing capability of the MCU core.

Wellman shows how the noise on a sine wave using a conventional ADC, significantly reduces with the ATmega4809. When he adds noise to the signal, ramping up the oversampling factor produces a much cleaner sinusoidal waveform. The addition of periodic noise also cleans up quickly and effectively with sampling delay to provide a useful signal.

With Microchip’s CIP approach, the MCU’s core is not burdened with computations because the peripheral performs the execution of the required function without interrupting core processing. The MCU also has an Event System that provides the capability of configuring the peripherals to interact with each other to create very deterministic, closed-loop systems with faster response time, lower power consumption and less code.

The 16 Channel, 10-bit ADC with Voltage Reference is one of the CIPs integrated on the chip. Other CIPs include a Math Accelerator, 24-bit Signal Measurement Timer, Windowed Watch Dog Timer, 16-bit Pulse Width Modulation (16-bit PWM), Cyclic Redundancy Check and more.

The 8-bit MCU with hardware multiplier runs at speeds up to 20 MHz and has up to 48 KB Flash, 6 KB SRAM and 256 bytes of EEPROM in 48-pin packages.