Reliable and small ultra-low-power microcontroller for complex sensor designs

In the DARWIN family, the Maxim Integrated MAX32672 is an ultra-low-power, highly integrated, cost-effective, and highly reliable 32-bit microcontroller, allowing designs with complex sensor processing without compromising on battery life. It incorporates a flexible and versatile power management unit with the powerful Arm Cortex-M4 processor with an FPU. It also provides legacy designs an easy and cost-optimal upgrade path from 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers.

The device incorporates 1MB of flash and 200KB of SRAM to fit application and sensor code. ECC is executed on the entire flash, RAM, and cache to provide extremely reliable code execution even in the most difficult environments. Brownout detection provides proper operation through power-down and power-up events and unexpected supply transients. The flash is organised into two equal-size physical banks to allow execute-while-write and facilitate 'live upgrades'.

Multiple high-speed peripherals, including 3.4MHz I2C, 50MHz SPI, and UART, are provided to maximise communication bandwidth. Also, a low-power UART (LPUART) is offered for operation in the lowest power sleep modes to enable wake-up activity with no data loss. A total of six timers with I/O capability are supplied, including two low-power timers to allow pulse counting, capture/compare, and PWM generation, even in the lowest power sleep modes. An incremental/quadrature encoder interface with multiple diagnostics is incorporated, particularly for motor control applications. A 1Msps, 12-channel, 12-bit SAR ADC is combined to digitise analog sensor signals or other analog measurements. Two low-power comparators, provided in all low-power modes, permit energy-efficient monitoring and wake-up on external analog signals. An ECDSA-based cryptographic secure bootloader is offered in ROM. The device is supplied in a 5mm x 5mm, 40-pin TQFN-EP or 7mm x 7mm, 56-pin TQFN.