For real-time control, more than just the brain is required. This slide addresses the peripherals of the Piccolo series microcontrollers. From an input perspective, Piccolo has a very fast three megasamples-per-second ratio-metric 12-bit ADC, ensuring accurate and speedy sensing at the input. Three analog comparators allow quick, asynchronous detection and response to conditions like overcurrent or overvoltage. On the output side, Piccolo has an exceptionally high resolution PWM with 150 picoseconds of resolution on both frequency and duty cycle. The PWMs are highly flexible in that they can support multiple power topologies. This is critical for renewable energy customers who need to be able to support a specialized DC/DC topology while also controlling an inverter topology, all handled by a single MCU. The F2806x enables that. Additionally, there is the external communication. The F2806x provides all of the industry standard interfaces – Controller Area Network (or CAN), SPI, I2C, UART as well as TI’s McBSP, which is a flexible serial port that can connect to a wide variety of industry standard codecs and data converters. TI has also added USB 2.0, which is becoming increasingly important for customers that need to add field firmware upgradability or data logging.