Silicon Laboratories recently announced the introduction of its C8051F7xx family of high pin-count MCUs for cost-sensitive, high I/O embedded systems. This family offers a new, patent-pending touch sensing feature that is said to be robust, accurate, responsive and easy to configure.
Offering up to 54 general purpose I/O pins and a 25 MIPS 8051 CPU, the C8051F7xx family brings a high level of processing power and flexibility to applications such as industrial controls, security systems, residential HVAC, home appliances, keyboards, cash machines and fax/printer/scanner front panels.
The touch sense on-chip peripheral uses a capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) with a 40 μs acquisition time which, when combined with the 25 MIPS CPU, enables sophisticated human interface functions, even when large arrays of touch sense elements are used. To combat issues in electrically noisy environments, the CDC offers high noise immunity. With up to 32 touch sensing inputs, featuring wake-on-touch, the MCU can be placed in a power saving mode and wake quickly upon touch to save overall system power in applications. An intuitive software GUI allows fast and easy configuration and an API library is provided for all common touch sense configurations such as virtual buttons, wheels and sliders.
The C8051F7xx family also provides a number of onboard analog features. A 10-bit successive approximation (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with on-chip voltage reference and temperature sensor provides capability for measurement and control. Up to 54 general purpose I/Os are offered to be used as ADC voltage measurement inputs, capacitive touch-sense inputs and/or digital communications I/Os. A calibrated two percent oscillator with guaranteed accuracy over the full MCU voltage supply and temperature range eliminates the need for an external crystal. In addition, the C8051F7xx family offers byte-erasable EEPROM with 100 000 write/erase cycle endurance guaranteed for storage of frequently updated data.
Also available is a development kit including IDE, target board, cables and power supply. A Silicon Labs GUI is provided for setup of the capacitive touch sense peripheral to get the desired configuration and performance. A separate capacitive touch sense evaluation kit provides fast and easy evaluation of the Silicon Labs capacitive sensing solution.
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