The New PIC18-Q43 Product Family: Combining Our Top MCU Peripherals with Easy to Use Development Tools for Faster Time to Market

When it comes to microcontroller (MCU) system design, software is often the key bottleneck for both time to market and system performance. By offloading many software tasks to hardware, the PIC18-Q43 family helps you bring higher performing solutions to market faster.

What’s Different About This New MCU family?

The PIC18-Q43 product family allows effortless hardware customization through a combination of Microchip’s popular, easy to use Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs) and award-winning development tools. The CIPs simplify the creation of customized hardware-based functions, which improve system response and reduce the number of external components and code development time. The PIC18-Q43 family is well suited for a wide range of real-time control applications including industrial control, consumer, automotive, motor control, capacitive touch sensing and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Its CIPs simplify development and enable quick response time to system events. These hardware-based CIPs significantly reduce the amount of software you need to write and validate, saving you time and effort. They also independently manage tasks and reduce the amount of processing required from the CPU, freeing it to handle more complex tasks within the system or go to sleep to save power. This eliminates the need for additional code and external components and reduces power consumption, allowing for deterministic response time and decreased validation time. CIPs can connect to the CPU, each other or directly to memories for multi-tasking and near zero latency for improved system response.

The PIC18-Q43 products are equipped with Direct Memory Access (DMA), Configurable Logic Cells (CLCs), 16-bit PWMs, a 12-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter with Computation (ADCC) and multiple communication interfaces. The six DMA channels on the PIC18-Q43 give the CIPs access to program and data memories in order to transfer data without CPU overhead, thereby reducing latency for real time control and simplifying software loops. There are eight CLCs, giving you the ability to create custom hardware-based logic functions for internal or external signal detection, providing you with the ability to tailor such things as waveform generation, timing measurements and more. CLCs are the "glue" logic to interconnect peripherals enabling a higher level of integration without external components, thus reducing PCB footprint and system costs.

Getting Started with Your Design

No matter what type of real-time control or connected application you plan to design, start with our cost-effective development board, the PIC18F57Q43 Curiosity Nano Evaluation kit (DM164150), to easily take your next idea to market. To get you started fast, the board has full programming and debugging capabilities. The PIC18-Q43 MCUs are also supported by our software tools including MPLAB® Code Configurator (MCC), a free software plug-in that provides a graphical interface to easily configure peripherals and functions. MCC is incorporated into our downloadable MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Several code examples are already available to help jumpstart your project.

Check out the PIC18-Q43 family here and improve your next design’s performance and speed up your time to market. You can purchase the PIC18-Q43 family of devices here, or from Microchip’s worldwide distribution network.