I’ve seen remarkable advances in the capabilities and economy of microcontrollers during my engineering career. 25 years ago my efforts were spent stretching memory and compute resources to realize a few application functions. The input and output functions required additional control hardware. Over time it wasn’t only the compute and memory resources that greatly expanded. Other digital and analog functions have been integrated into microcontrollers.
I designed my first switching converter using a microcontroller as the power controller over ten years ago. Then I was limited to a switching frequency of 50KHz and other power control functions like cycle-by-cycle current limiting had to be done externally. Today I’ve done a multi-phase and variable frequency application that switches at 300KHz and utilizes the microcontrollers integrated comparators and other power control functions.
Today my efforts are spent thinking of ways modern microcontrollers with their vast array of peripherals can bring previously inconceivable features into products. Are you interested in what I can think of for your application? Go to my general engineering website, www.embeddedee.com, and submit an inquiry.
Electronics is fun but it’s not useful in itself. The products I’ve designed have required some level of understanding of the customer’s application. When I worked for a lighting company for a few years I studied lighting and color science so that I could design hardware and software capable of precise color light generation. I have continued to develop new LED drive hardware and color mixing methods. To see my latest developments visit www.led-engineer.com.