The Design Sweet Spot: A 32-pin, 32 KB MCU
A 32-pin, 32 KB microcontroller (MCU) is the sweet spot for designs that want to optimize performance while minimizing cost and design space.
Want to build the next piece of tech that will change the world? You’ve done all your functional mapping and have a good understanding of the requirements your software has—but what hardware should you use for your project? Finding the right microcontroller (MCU) for your design can be challenging because you must balance performance, feature set and additional resources against BOM cost and design space. The solution is to start at the “sweet spot”.
The sweet spot is often a 32-pin, 32 KB 8-bit MCU. These MCUs contain the ideal number of pins and nonvolatile memory for most applications while performing many critical functions without letting large amounts of resources go unused.
Some applications that take advantage of the sweet spot include automotive controllers, sensor nodes, LED lighting, industrial control, home automation and other IoT devices.
Why Are 32-pin, 32 KB 8-bit MCUs Dominating?
Many applications interpret and filter sensor data, adjust for environmental changes and transfer or communicate that data to another system or subsystem. While these tasks may be similar across a wide variety of designs, the specific needs vary. The key requirements for an embedded MCU are to have enough processing power to handle all tasks involved, enough I/O to connect to the outside world and enough memory to store temporary data, algorithms and modern communication stacks. No one wants to waste resources and space by having too much processing power, I/O or memory. This is where 32-pin, 32 KB microcontrollers thrive.
An MCU in the sweet spot dominates because it fulfills all the key requirements without wasting processing power. In addition, Microchip's 8-bit MCUs operate in the range of 1.8–5 volts, which adds design flexibility, with a variety of Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs) that offload tasks from the CPU to keep your design low power and save you BOM cost and space. To save you time, all of our MCUs are fully supported by our MPLAB development ecosystem, which includes free IDEs, compilers, code configurators, code examples and online training videos. Visit our tools and resources page to learn more about our development ecosystem.
Remember that the 32-pin, 32 KB 8-bit MCU sweet spot is a safe choice for your next project, but it could lead you to a smaller or bigger MCU depending on your specific application needs. To help you get started, use the links below or click here to learn more about the MCUs that are in the sweet spot of embedded design.
Featured Products