“Our PIC32CX-BZ2 family of microcontrollers eliminates the obstacles that have complicated the commercialization of wireless applications, from sourcing and complexity issues to regulatory certification barriers and concerns about long-term support,” said Steve Caldwell, vice president of Microchip’s Wireless Solutions business unit. “Our family tightly integrates wireless connectivity with a microcontroller based on our decades of specialized expertise, backed by a vertically integrated manufacturing strategy that includes integrated circuits, Microchip’s high-integration software stacks, in-house module manufacturing, and customer-driven obsolescence criteria.”
Microchip's PIC32CX-BZ2 family includes System-on-Chip (SoC) devices as well as RF-ready modules certified to standards worldwide. In addition to Bluetooth Low Energy, this family offers Zigbee® stacks and over-the-air (OTA) upgrade capabilities. Hardware features include a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), multiple timers/counters for control channels (TCC), a built-in cryptographic engine, and numerous interfaces for touch peripherals, CAN buses, sensors, and displays, among others. The family's 1 MB of Flash memory supports large application code, multi-protocol wireless stacks, and OTA updates.
Approval packages for AEC-Q100 Grade 1 (125 °C) further facilitate the integration of wireless connectivity when very robust solutions are required.
The PIC32CX-BZ2 microcontroller family simplifies development with Microchip's MPLAB® Harmony 32-bit embedded software development environment. MPLAB Code Configurator integration enables developers to quickly begin prototyping with the PIC32CX-BZ2 family thanks to automatic drag-and-drop code generation. Numerous application code examples are available on GitHub, linked by MPLAB Code Configurator and MPLAB Discover. RF design with PIC32CX-BZ2 SoCs is further simplified by ecosystem chip reference design packages and wireless design verification services. Customers with little or no RF experience can take advantage of Microchip's WBZ451 modules, which are pre-certified to various standards worldwide and are based on an optimized RF design.
Development Tools:
In addition to MPLAB Code Configurator, the MPLAB Harmony v3 environment includes many other tools and an ecosystem comprised of debuggers, schedulers, a virtual crawler, and compilers. Support also includes demo applications and documentation on GitHub, wireless design verification services, and functional blocks that guide developers through all phases of the application development process. The PIC32CX-BZ2 family is supported by the PIC32CX-BZ2 and WBZ451 Curiosity development boards (Reference: EV96B94A).
Availability:
The PIC32CX-ZB2 family is now available from stock. The PIC32CX1012BZ25048-I and PIC32CX1012BZ25048-E SoCs are supplied in 7
x 7 mm 48 QFN (Quad-Flat No-leads) packages. The WBZ451PE-I and WBZ451UE-I modules are supplied with an integrated antenna on the printed circuit board and a U.FL connector for an external antenna, respectively.
