Microchip: Driving Excellence in Microcontroller Design

The semiconductor industry lives and dies by a simple statement of belief: faster, cheaper, and smaller. With the progression of technology, manufacturing semiconductor products is becoming more challenging. It is now imperative for researchers and manufacturers collaborate in real time to iron out the complexities in circuit design and manufacturing. This is where Microchip Technology comes in.

Microchip products are very ubiquitous and goes into lots of different market applications and lots of different industries

Head quartered in Chandler, AZ, the company provides microcontroller and analog semiconductors that help lower the total system cost, providing low-risk product development for thousands of diverse customer applications worldwide. "Microchip products are very ubiquitous and goes into lots of different market applications and lots of different industries," says Steve Sanghi, CEO of Microchip.

While many big chip makers are fighting over PCs and mobile phones, Microchip has embedded itself in cars, copiers, and even wallets. The semiconductor company offers a wide range of embedded devices, including 8-bit microcontrollers, KEELOQ brand code hopping devices used in keyless locks, smart cards and garage door openers, and specialty memory products such as Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EEPROMs).
The company's chips are used by many customers in the industrial, consumer, automotive, office automation, and telecommunications markets.Having on-board peripheral functions that suit the requirements of a particular product, semiconductor devices like microcontrollers target specific markets. Microchip delivers several 8-bit microcontroller families consisting of configurations like PIC18, PIC16, and PIC12.The recent and the most popular microcontroller to come out of Microchip is PIC24, a 16-bit microcontroller. The PIC microcontroller family enables designers to scale up the designs quickly with higher performance and lower power, thus saving significant time and cost involved in designing new hardware. Microchip's 16-bit,PIC24 MCUs and dsPIC Digital Signal Controllers provide designers with an easy upgrade path. Along with higher performance, it also delivers peripherals, software, and hardware development tools.

Microchip, to support the development of its microcontrollers (MCUs) and Digital Signal Controllers (DSCs),provides tools as a part of its Net Beans based MPLAB X IDE, MPLAB Code Configurator and MPLAB Harmony Integrated Software Framework. The company's MPLAB X IDE provides a single integrated project design environment for all MCUs and DSCs. It also works effortlessly with compilers, debuggers, emulators and programmers on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems.Microchip's design centers provide all the necessary information to get

Steve Sanghi

Chairman & CEO

started with a new design within a specific application segment. Microchip serves many customers who design high-volume embedded control applications in the automotive, office-automation, consumer, communications, and industrial-control markets worldwide. The company's aerospace and defense application has a broad portfolio of power, analog, micro controllers, digital, memory, RF and mixed signal solutions. They provide military-grade products capable of integrating with the present and future aerospace and defense sector programs. Moreover, Microchip's PIC32 family of MCUs adds high quality digital audio to customer's application with the right mix of performance and price.

Currently, Microchip is focusing its resources on high value, high quality products to continuously improve all aspects of their business, providing an industry leading return on investment. The company looks toward providing top-notch technology products, that add value while reducing a customer's risk and increasing their efficiency.