Small Form Factor MCU makes the most of a 5 x 5 mm package

9th March 2006

ES Admin

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Silicon Laboratories microcontrollers has introduced a new MCU that integrates up to 32 kB Flash memory and high-performance analog peripherals, including a SmaRTClock with failsafe recovery features, into a compact 5 x 5 mm package. Its small size makes it ideal for portable equipment, instrumentation and measurement devices, consumer medical products and industrial meters.

The C8051F41x also offers versatile voltage supply from 2 to 5.25 V with an on-chip programmable voltage regulator and up to 5 V tolerant independent I/O voltage control.

It features Silicon Laboratories’ high-speed, pipelined 50 MIPS 8051 core, 16 to 32 kB Flash memory, 2048 B RAM and versatile voltage range operation. The C8051F41x integrates on-chip peripherals such as a 12-bit 200 ksps analog-to-digital converter, two 12-bit digital-to-analog converters, temperature sensor, programmable voltage reference and comparators. The on-chip voltage regulator may be used to supply power to external ICs in the system making it ideal for legacy systems with high-voltage supplies as well as new battery powered systems that require low-voltage operation. The C8051F41x integrates a two percent accurate precision internal oscillator that eliminates the need for an external crystal or resonator. On-board serial communication peripherals include UART, SMBus™ and SPI™ bus serial ports.

The C8051F41x also includes a SmaRTClock, an embedded real-time clock that enables the MCU to automatically detect power supply failures and switch to a battery backup that will allow continued operation of the backup RAM down to 1 V. The SmaRTClock can keep time accurately and reliably and detect a clock failure, even when the MCU is sleeping, and alert the CPU so that recovery is possible.