From legacy controllers to modern MCUs; the line-up helps industrial and building automation designers improve real time control without redesigning proven hardware platforms.
Embedded system designers continue to face pressure to balance low power consumption, cost efficiency and ease of development while meeting rising performance and safety requirements. This is particularly challenging in high volume applications such as industrial control, building automation and consumer electronics, where mixed voltage operation, real time responsiveness and long product life cycles are critical.
Microchip Technology has expanded its Arm Cortex M0 plus microcontroller line-up with the launch of the PIC32CM PL10 family. The new devices extend Microchip’s PIC32C portfolio and are positioned as part of the company’s unified MCU strategy, offering pin to pin compatibility with AVR microcontrollers.
The PIC32CM PL10 MCUs combine 5V capable operation with Core Independent Peripherals that offload time critical and deterministic tasks from the CPU. This architecture improves real time performance while lowering power consumption and simplifying system design. Integrated touch and analog peripherals, along with broad toolchain support, are aimed at accelerating development across industrial, automotive and IoT applications.
Key features of the product include:
- Arm Cortex M0 plus core with low power operation
- 5V capable devices operating from 1.8 to 5.5 volts
- Core Independent Peripherals for improved real time performance
- Integrated Peripheral Touch Controller and 12 bit ADC
- Support for CMSIS enabling modular and reusable code
- Pin to pin compatibility with AVR microcontrollers
- Integrated Multi Voltage IO supporting mixed voltage systems without external level shifters
- Compliance with ISO 26262 functional safety requirements
- Broad tool support including MPLAB, Visual Studio Code, IAR, Arm Keil, SEGGER, Zephyr and MikroElektronika
- AI assisted development using the MPLAB AI Coding Assistant
Greg Robinson, corporate vice president of Microchip’s MCU business unit, says, “PL10 MCUs help engineers more easily migrate to higher performance microcontrollers while maintaining the straightforward development experience, power efficiency and cost structure of our established 8 bit solutions.” With the PL10 family, Microchip reinforces its commitment to a scalable MCU roadmap spanning entry level devices through to future AI capable platforms.
