PIC24F DA Family of Microcontrollers

The PIC24F DA family enables you to easily control touch-based displays while providing a variety of connectivity options to enhance functionality. The DA family features a fully integrated advanced graphics subsystem for graphics acceleration and a display controller to directly drive displays up to 4.3" WQVGA with 480 × 272 resolution. This family integrates three dedicated graphic acceleration engines, each supporting a Direct Memory Access (DMA) interface to the frame buffer memory, effectively driving graphics performance in processing and rendering graphics objects, providing easy switching between fonts and languages and fast data or image decompression.

The integrated display controller is capable of directly driving almost any LCD display with an RGB or STN/CSTN interface, which includes a wide range of TFT, STN and some OLED displays. These features effectively create a complete graphical subsystem that is fully integrated on the same chip as the microcontroller (MCU), driving up to 640 × 480 (VGA) display resolution. The DA family is available in two RAM configurations, which can be used for internal frame buffering: 24 KB and 96 KB. With the Color Look-Up Table (CLUT), this integrated memory supports up to 256 colors from a possible 65,536 (16 bpp) palette to appear on the screen simultaneously without any external RAM components. The ability to compile and switch between color palettes is significant because it helps create an even more immersive user interface without imposing massive memory overheads.

In addition, the PIC24 DA family comes with fully-integrated USB (host, device and On-the-Go), SPI, and UART interfaces, which makes it ideal for consumer, medical and industrial applications. These integrated features address the commercial issue of minimizing cost and number of components by integrating all of the additional hardware necessary to drive an LCD display. The PIC24F DA family significantly lowers bill of material and system costs compared to configuring graphics subsystems using discrete display controllers and RAM, or more expensive displays with integrated controllers and/or frame buffers.