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Microchip Announces PIC18-Q20 Device Family with I3C Support
Microchip recently posted a product brief to their website with little fanfare introducing a new family of PIC18 devices which will be their first to include I3C support.
The family features 6 device variants scaling programing memory, SRAM, pin count / package size, and interestingly enough, the number of I3C peripherals – the larger devices have 2 x I3C peripherals.
| Device | Flash | SRAM | Pin Count | I3C Peripheral Count |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PIC18F04Q20 | 16KB | 1KB | 14 | 1 |
| PIC18F14Q20 | 16KB | 1KB | 20 | 2 |
| PIC18F05Q20 | 32KB | 2KB | 14 | 1 |
| PIC18F15Q20 | 32KB | 2KB | 20 | 2 |
| PIC18F06Q20 | 64KB | 4KB | 14 | 1 |
| PIC18F16Q20 | 64KB | 4KB | 20 | 2 |
It's worth noting that these devices only support I3C Target role – they cannot behave as controllers on the I3C bus. That said, I believe these microcontrollers will be the foundation of many of the first I3C Target custom applications. Another interesting feature of these microcontrollers is that they have Multi-Voltage IO Pins, allowing I3C to operate down to 1.0V, with other pins operating at a more traditional range of 1.62V- 5.5V at the same time. The colorful pin diagram below does a great job of showing the different power domains without needing to look it up in tables.
Pinout diagram from the PIC18-Q20 Family Product Brief.
I'm personally excited to see I3C start showing up in Microchip's catalog, and even more so excited to see it show up in smaller / more utilitarian 8-bit microcontrollers. Up till now, the vast majority of I3C peripherals have been in Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 devices which are an entirely different beast.
All of the details can be found in the PIC18-Q20 Family Product Brief, however at this time no datasheets or product pages for devices in this family have been made publicly available.
This article will be updated when additional details are released.
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