The New Requirements for MCU from New Applications
In recent years, the smart grid, Internet of Things, smart furniture, automotive electronics, medical electronics, and lighting are all the emerging MCU application areas, and pose new requirements for MCU.
1. High integration, miniaturization. In order to meet the requirements of the target application, the integration requirements of MCU become increasingly high, from the original Intel 8051 MCU to current bloom situation of MCU. In addition to the changes in the system architecture, the greatest change is MCU integrates growing analog parts, including analog input / output, drive, as the commonly seen 8bit, 10bit, 12bit ADC / DAC, voltage comparators, PWM output, LCD driver, etc; part of MCU even integrates LDO, increases the drive capability of I / O port. MCU gradually move closer to the SoC to meet a variety of application needs
2. High reliability. With continuous development of product, reliability requirements become growing high. In addition to the high reliability requirement of automotive electronics, such emerging applications as smart grid, Internet of things, medical electronics, lighting are the application for high reliability.
3. Low power consumption. Among the emerging MCU application areas, many applications are related to power management, mainly to improve energy efficiency, such as smart grid, lighting; part of application environment use cell to supply power, including medical electronics, Internet of Things, which all requires MCU to have lower power consumption to meets the needs of a variety of applications.
4. Higher processing speed. The emerging applications also post increasingly higher requirements for MCU’s processing speed. 8bitMC is moving toward 16bit、32bitMCU; more precise measurement and control, and better energy efficiency all asks more complex mathematical models and computing; to meet computing, part of MCU increases MDU of hardware to meet the need of power consumption and computing speed.
Facing the requirements of these emerging application areas, global leading MCU manufacturer are largely promoting 32bit, low power-consumption, high process-speed MCU. Taking Silicon Labs MCU as an example, the newly introduced 32bit SIM3 series of products is to meet these market needs with the highest process speed reaching 80MHz; there also shows hardware MDU to ensure the process speed of various computing. Meanwhile, the series of products achieve standby power consumption falling down to nA grade, and integrates multi analog devices, such as SIM3U series, aside from integrating AC/DAC/PWM/LCD driver / voltage comparator / low voltage detection, the product also combines LDO in the MCU.