PCM programmer
Joined: 06 Sep 2003 Posts: 21708
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Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 12:34 pm |
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It's for historical reasons. Microchip originally designed their chips for 5v
only. Then they decided to make "low voltage" versions. So maybe they
just did some die selection to find individual chips that could be certified
to work at lower voltages. But they didn't upgrade the rest of the design.
That's what you're seeing.
In more recent PICs, they do allow selection of different Brownout
voltages. My advice is to use the Microchip Advanced Part Selector:
http://www.microchip.com/maps/microcontroller.aspx
In the Prefix drop-down box, select "PIC16F". Then wait a moment
while the screen updates. Then go down to the "Pkg Pins" line near
the bottom and set both columns for 18 pins. Again, you will have to
wait a moment after each change for the screen to update. Then go
near the top, and in the P.Memory(KWords) line, set the first column
for "4". This matches the 16F88 which has 4K words of Flash.
These settings will give you any 16F PIC that has 18 pins and at least
4K words of ROM. I see 5 PICs in the list at the top. One of them is
the 16F88 of course. You can then investigate the data sheets for each
one and see if it has the features you need.
We did this recently. We wanted a PIC with more memory than the
16F628 in one of our current designs, but in the same package.
We found the 16F1847, which is in that list, and it's a much more modern
PIC and it has a lot more features. It costs much less, too.
Anyway, if you look at the Config Bits section of the 16F1847 and
16LF1847 data sheet, you see it offers these Brownout voltage options:
Quote: |
bit 10 BORV: Brown-out Reset Voltage Selection bit
1 = Brown-out Reset voltage set to 1.9V (typical)
0 = Brown-out Reset voltage set to 2.7V (typical)
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That's for all versions, F and LF.
At the start of the data sheet, it shows this:
Quote: |
Special Microcontroller Features:
• 1.8V-5.5V Operation – PIC16F1847
• 1.8V-3.6V Operation – PIC16LF1847 |
However, 16F1847 requires ICD3 or Pickit3 as the programmer. |
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