PIC24F Microcontrollers with Integrated Graphics

The use of graphical menus with advanced touch buttons or touch screens is becoming the preferred method for implementing modern user interfaces. A graphical user interface offers greater flexibility for customization, better access to context sensitive menus, and the capability to accommodate a vast number of use cases. Microchip delivers a family of low cost, high performance PIC24FJ DA microcontrollers that feature fully integrated and advanced graphics subsystems. A microcontroller in this family integrates three dedicated graphic acceleration engines. These engines support a DMA interface to the frame buffer memory, effectively driving graphics performance in processing and rendering graphics objects, providing easy switching between fonts and languages, and fast data or image decompression.

The integrated display controller is capable of directly driving almost any LCD display with an RGB or STN / CSTN interface, which includes a wide range of TFT, STN, and some OLED displays. These features effectively create a complete graphical subsystem that is fully integrated on the same chip as the MCU, driving up to 640 x 480 (VGA) display resolution. The PIC24FJ DA family is available in two RAM configurations, which can be used for internal frame buffering: 24 Kbyte and 96 Kbyte. With the color look-up table, this integrated memory supports up to 256 colors from a possible 65,536 (16 bpp) palette to appear on the screen simultaneously without an external RAM components. The ability to compile and switch between color palettes is significant because it helps create an even more immersive user interface without imposing massive memory overheads.

Each of the PIC24FJ DA family members integrates Microchip's popular mTouch™ technology for implementing capacitive touch buttons or keys, which can be used to add flexible and user-friendly interfaces on a range of front panel materials. With the addition of fully integrated USB (host, device, and on-the-go), SPI, and UART interfaces, the new PIC® family is able to meet the requirements of a wide range of devices. These integrated features address the commercial issue of minimizing cost and number of components by integrating all of the additional hardware necessary to drive an LCD display. The PIC24FJ DA family significantly lowers bill of material and system costs compared to configuring graphics subsystems using discrete display controllers and RAM or more expensive displays with integrated controllers and/or frame buffers.