Manufactured by Microchip, the PIC ("Peripheral Interface Controller") is a powerful, robust microcontroller popular among engineers and hobbyists alike. PIC microcontrollers come in a variety of "flavors", each with different components and capabilities. Many types of electronic projects can be constructed easily with the PIC family of microprocessors, among them clocks, very simple video games, robots, servo controllers, and many more. The PIC is a very general purpose microcontroller that can come with many different options, for very reasonable prices.

dsPIC30Fs are Microchip's newer family, which entered mass production in late 2004. They are designed as a PIC with digital signal processing capabilities. These are Microchip's first inherent 16-bit (data) microcontrollers. They build on the PICs existing strengths by offering hardware MAC (multiply-accumulate), barrel shifting, bit reversal, (16x16)-bit multiplication and other digital signal processing operations.

16-bit PIC24 microcontrollers and dsPIC33 Digital Signal Controllers (DSC) offer a new level of performance and higher integration. Features supporting this compatibility between these families include common: Instruction set & architecture (dsPIC DSCs add DSP capability), Peripherals, Pin-out. With 16 MIPS performance and an extensive peripheral set, the PIC24F MCUs are a highly cost-effective solution for all but the most demanding 16-bit applications. The PIC24F also offers an easy migration path for design engineers whose applications have outgrown the performance offered by 8-bit MCUs. The 40 MIPS dsPIC33F family is developed for high performance embedded control applications. Compared to the dsPIC30F family, the dsPIC33F family offers larger RAM and Flash memory options and adds DMA.

Cypress PSoC's are programmable systems-on-chips that integrate a microcontroller and the analog and digital components that typically surround it in an embedded system. A single PSoC device can integrate as many as 100 peripheral functions with a microcontroller, saving customers design time, Board space, power consumption, and from 5 cents to as much as $10 in system costs.

The Atmel AVR is a family of RISC microcontrollers from Atmel. The AVR is a Harvard architecture CPU. It has 32 8-bit registers. Some instructions only operate on a subset of these registers. The concatenated register file, input/output file and data memory make up a unified address space accessed through load/store operations. Unlike the PIC, the stack is located in this unified memory space and isn't strictly limited to a fixed size.

The AT89 series is an Intel 8051-compatible family of 8 bit microcontrollers (µCs). Based on the Intel 8051 core, the AT89 series remains very popular as general purpose microcontrollers, due to their industry standard instruction set, and low unit cost. This allows a great amount of legacy code to reused without modification in new applications. While considerably less powerful than the newer AT90 series of AVR RISC microcontrollers, new product development has continued with the AT89 series for the aforementioned advantages. Of more recent times, the AT89 series has been augmented with 8051-cored special function microcontrollers, specifically in the areas of USB, I²C, SPI and CAN bus controllers, MP3 decoders and hardware PWM.

A characteristic feature of ARM processors is their low electric power consumption, which makes them particularly suitable for use in portable devices. In fact, almost all modern mobile phones and PDAs contain ARM CPU's, making them the most widely-used 32-bit microprocessor family in the world. Today ARM's account for over 75% of all 32-bit embedded CPUs..

The HC908 microcontroller provides intelligence for demanding motion control decisions while its flash memory enables on-the-fly programming and production flexibility. Additional MCU features include dual timer channels, a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter and serial peripheral interface. The 68HC11 is a microcontroller (µC) family descended from the Motorola 6800 microprocessor. The 68HC11 devices are more powerful and more expensive than the 68HC05 microcontrollers, and are used in barcode readers, hotel card key writers, and various other embedded systems.

VR Stamp simplifies the integration of speech recognition into products by combining all key components into a small 40-pin DIP footprint module. A low-noise audio channel and standardized packaging allow rapid prototyping, less debugging and shorter time to market. The VR Stamp offers 24 I/O lines, as well as connections for a power, ground, microphone, speaker, and logic-level RS232 interface. With its small size, full suite of development tools and Sensory's world-class FluentChip™ Technologies, the VR Stamp will change the way you think about speech recognition.

Info