Well,

It's two weeks after the Master's Conference, and I just got back from two
weeks as Director of our church camp. Can you say "exhausted"?

Anyway, one of the most exciting things we saw at the Masters was
preliminary information on the subject processor.

This baby is planned to run at 30Mips (I heard mumbles about even higher
speeds (hint: check the PLL multipliers and external crystal speeds). In
addition to being a 16-bit microcontroller, the chip contains a classic
DSP-style multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) engine. It supports zero-overhead
loops, including the ability to fetch filter constants directly out of
program memory.

Even without the DSP aspects this chip makes a pretty powerful 16-bit
microcontroller. Upward compatibility from code written for 8-bit PICs is
quite good.

Also, some of the peripherals planned for this architecture are nicely
extended versions of existing PIC peripherals. Other peripherals are just
incredible (check out the fancy PWM engines).

This will be a chip to watch.

More information about the dsPIC30F should be on Mchips website either now,
or in the near future.

Bob Ammerman
RAm Systems
(contract development of high performance, high function, low-level
software)

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