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This is part of why Intel acquired Altera. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the latest AVR families have configurable glue logic akin to a tiny PLD.
by kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
This is part of why Intel acquired Altera. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the latest AVR families have configurable glue logic akin to a tiny PLD.
- zrail 4y agoIn the same vein, the Raspberry Pi RP2040 has what they call Programmable IO modules which are tiny cores that can run small state machines doing whatever you want, separate from the main ARM cores.
- sk0g 4y agoYeah, doing my thesis with it right now, but not sure if it's worth looking into. For one I'd have to brush up on ASM, while the two-core Pico lets me meet my requirements as-is anyway. Pretty cool though, you can write VGA drivers with it apparently!
- fragmede 4y agoPLDesque glue logic is cool, but the coolest thing I've seen is uC's with fully programmable pins, so eg the DAC device inside the chip can be connected to any of the external pins, making board layout dramatically simpler.
- bpye 4y agoI'm guessing you've seen the Infineon (formally Cypress) PSoC [0] stuff too? Both analogue and digital peripherals that can be configured mostly arbitrarily. There are also some neat mixed-signal parts from Dialog [1] - no MCU but interesting analogue and digital blocks all the same. [0] - https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/32-bit-psoc-arm-cortex-microcontroller/ https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/32-b... [1] - https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/greenpak https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/greenpak
- duskwuff 4y agoThe analog configurability of PSoCs is perhaps a little less flexible than you might be led to believe. There's a small number of analog components which can be linked to pins or to each other through a limited number of non-uniform interconnects. It's certainly useful, don't get me wrong, but I'd hesitate to call it arbitrarily configurable.