dsPIC

The dsPIC is a family of 16-bit digital signal controllers from Microchip Technology that combines a digital signal processor (DSP) engine with a microcontroller core. These devices are designed to handle real-time signal processing and embedded control within a single chip, supporting applications such as motor control, audio processing, power electronics, and sensor data processing.

The core features include a dedicated DSP engine capable of fast multiply-accumulate operations, along with hardware loops, circular addressing, and modulo addressing to support efficient implementations of filters and FFTs. The dsPIC combines DSP capabilities with a microcontroller instruction set, enabling mixed DSP and control code. It typically uses a Harvard-like memory architecture with separate program and data spaces and integrates peripherals and memory for low-latency operation in real time.

Memory and peripherals vary by device but generally include program flash memory, data RAM, and in some models flash options for non-volatile data. Peripherals cover multiple analog channels through ADCs and DACs, PWM outputs, capture/compare units, and timers, as well as serial communication interfaces such as UART, SPI, and I2C. Many dsPICs offer DMA channels and an event or interrupt system to support high-throughput data processing and peripheral-to-peripheral signaling. Development and debugging are supported by Microchip tools and compilers, including MPLAB X IDE and the XC16 compiler, along with libraries and example code for DSP routines and peripheral configuration. Peripheral Pin Select features enable flexible mapping of peripherals to I/O pins on many devices.

Variants and evolution include lines such as dsPIC30F, dsPIC33F, dsPIC33EP, and dsPIC33CH. The dsPIC33CH family adds dual-core capabilities for parallel processing or separate control loops, expanding the range of real-time DSP-enabled applications.