MEC1428 MECC BOARD

The MEC1428 is an embedded controller designed for computing applications such as notebooks, tablets and single board computing platforms. The MEC1428 has a highly-configurable, mixed signal, advanced I/O controller architecture. The device incorporates a 32-bit MIPS32 M14K Microcontroller core with a closely-coupled SRAM for code and data. A secure boot-loader is used to download the custom firmware image from the system’s shared SPI Flash device, thereby allowing system designers to customize the device’s behavior.

The MEC1428 is one of the first embedded controllers to support both the Intel® Corporation’s new Enhanced Serial Peripheral Interface (eSPI) and the existing Low Pin Count interface (LPC). To ease the computing industry’s transition to the new interface and lower-voltage designs, Microchip’s MEC1428 provides a flexible arrangement that allows multiple I/O signals to be configured to support either 3.3V or 1.8V, reducing the system bill-of-materials cost by eliminating the need for external voltage translators. These features of the MEC1428 allow for a seamless migration of intellectual property (IP) reuse across multiple x86 computing platform architectures, such as Intel Atom™, Intel iCore™ and AMD-based systems.


The MEC1428 offers a software development system interface that includes a Trace FIFO Debug port, a host accessible serial debug port with a 16C550A register interface, a Port 80 BIOS Debug Port, and an In-circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) interface. The MEC1428 is supported by Microchip’s award winning MPLAB development tools including the MPLAB X32 Compiler and MPLAB REAL ICE in-circuit emulator, the ICD3 in-circuit debugger and the PICKit3.