Building on decades of experience in serving embedded applications where low power, affordability and ease of development are critical, Microchip Technology has added PIC32CM PL10 MCUs to its PIC32C family of Arm Cortex-M0+ core devices. PL10 MCUs feature a rich set of Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs), 5V operation, touch capabilities, integrated toolsets and safety compliance. The device family targets high-volume applications including industrial control, building automation, consumer appliances, power tools and sensor-based systems. As part of the company’s unified MCU strategy, PL10 devices offer pin-to-pin compatibility with AVR MCUs.
The integrated Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC), along with a 12-bit Analogue-to-Digital Converter (ADC) are designed to provide responsive performance in touch applications and strong noise immunity for analogue signal measurement. Additional on-chip CIPs help offload time-critical, repetitive and deterministic tasks from the CPU to improve real-time performance and power efficiency. The PL10 supports the Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS), enabling the development of modular, reusable application code to accelerate the process.
In addition to support from Microchip’s MPLAB development ecosystem, the PL10 family incorporates industry-standard tools and integrated development environments (IDEs), providing developers with more flexibility in how they build, debug, and deploy their software. Compatible third-party tools include Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code), IAR Systems, Arm Keil, SEGGER, Zephyr and MikroElektronika. AI-driven resources such as the MPLAB AI Coding Assistant offer context-aware code generation and real-time product insights to help accelerate and simplify development.
“PL10 MCUs help engineers more easily migrate to higher performance microcontrollers while maintaining the straightforward development experience, power efficiency and cost structure of our established 8-bit solutions,” said Greg Robinson, corporate vice president of Microchip’s MCU business unit. “As we prepare to introduce a range of new microcontrollers over the next 12-18 months, with everything spanning entry-level to AI-capable devices, Microchip is strengthening its commitment to a comprehensive MCU portfolio designed to meet evolving market demands.”
The PL10 family is designed to comply with various industry safety standards, including International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 26262 for functional safety in electrical and electronic systems of road vehicles. Additionally, the MCUs are designed to operate from 1.8 to 5.5 volts, supporting performance in high-noise environments such as automotive, IoT, industrial automation and consumer electronics applications. PL10 MCUs enable simultaneous connection to devices operating at different voltage levels without external level shifters using the integrated Multi-Voltage I/O (MVIO).
