The major building blocks for a white-LED driver are an oscillator, a charge pump, and a regulated current source. National Semiconductor (www.national.com) produces a device that contains all these ...

All of Microchip’s baseline PIC microcontrollers have internal 4-MHz oscillators, which are useful for freeing up one or two pins for I/O use and allowing you to build minimal-component-count designs ...

Renesas Electronics has unveiled 16 new 16bit microcontrollers within its R8C/Lx mcu Series. According to Renesas, the product range provides the 'industry's most stable accuracy' on the high speed on ...

In this article, I'll be explaining the basics of how microcontrollers work, physically and virtually. First off, microcontrollers are no simple thing, so don't be discouraged if you find it ...

Microchip's PIC10F32X incorporates a number of neat features like a Configurable Logic Cell, a Complementary Waveform Generator, and a Numerically Controlled Oscillator. The idea of incorporating ...

While DSPs are the primary controllers in uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) with power-factor correction (PFC), ac generation and battery management, David Caldwell, Flextek Electronics, Carlsbad, ...

It’s generally pretty easy to spot a microcontroller on a PCB. There are clues aplenty: the more-or-less central location, the nearby crystal oscillator, the maze of supporting passives, and perhaps ...

A traditional early project for someone discovering a love for electronics has been for many years a metal detector. This would mean a few transistors back in the day, but today it’s more likely to ...