Voltage comparators began appearing in single-chip microcontrollers (MCUs) in the late 1990s. At the time, the change was viewed as a simple cost reduction. Comparators required less silicon, while ...

Microchip is aiming at analogue sensors with a microcontroller that can measure signals while consuming less than 3µA while sleeping with one comparator monitoring an in-coming voltage. Called ...

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are used in a wide range of electronic devices. However, most of the low-cost microcontrollers do not include an ADC peripheral. This design idea provides a way to ...

It never fails — we post a somewhat simple project using a microcontroller and someone points out that it could have been accomplished better with a 555 timer or discrete transistors or even a couple ...

When I was in graduate school 10 years ago, a controls group proposed to the power-electronics center to use an advanced microcontroller in power supplies. This controller was to implement a new ...

There was a time when microprocessors were slow and expensive devices that needed piles of support chips to run, so engineers came up with ingenious tricks using extra hardware preprocessing inputs to ...