Out in Front: January 18, 1996

The PIC14000 comes in a 28-pin package and features a user-programmable, slope ADC with programmable resolution from 8 to 16 bits, allowing you to trade off accuracy for conversion time. For example, with a 4-MHz clock, conversion times for 12- and 16-bit resolution are 1 and 16 msec, respectively.

Instead of requiring an external three-pin voltage regulator, the PIC14000 integrates voltage-regulator control. The µC also has an internal multirange, 4-bit current DAC, eight external and six internal analog input channels, an internal voltage reference, an on-chip low-voltage detector, and a temperature sensor. The multirange DACs let you program the device to wake from sleep upon sensing a specific level or a range of current flow. During production, Microchip measures the PIC14000’s analog circuits and stores calibration factors in the on-chip EPROM. Microchip intends that you use these calibration factors to eliminate external potentiometers and, therefore, reduce testing and assembly costs.

The PIC14000 has 20 I/O pins with individual direction control. A two-channel serial port is compatible with the I2C, Access.bus, Intel/Duracell Systems Management Bus (SMBus), and Standard Battery Data standards. The µC supports a 200-µA sleep mode and a 5-µA hibernation mode. The PIC14000 comes in PDIP, SOIC, SSOP, and CERDIP packages with 4k×14 bits of on-chip EPROM and 192 bytes of RAM. Prices start at $6.85 (1000). Like the other PIC 16/17 devices, Microchip’s PICMASTER development system supports the PIC14000. — by Markus Levy

Microchip Technology Inc,
Chandler, AZ. (602) 786-7668.