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Article: Squeeze extra outputs from a pin-limited microcontroller.(design ideas)
- Article from:
- EDN Asia
- Article date:
- November 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Reed Business Information, Inc. (US). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Many of today's designs use low-cost microcontrollers from Freescale and Microchip, but during the last decade, device packages have resorted to ever-smaller footprints featuring as few as eight or even six pins. Although these packages minimize pc-board area, they also reduce the number of available I/O pins and pose problems for designers who need to add one more function without migrating to a device that occupies a larger package.
To overcome a shortage of inputs, a designer can increase a small microcontroller's inputs by writing a program that multiplexes and polls the input pins. However, this approach doesn't lend itself to extending outputs, because most ...
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... ... Cairns, both of Oxford, Great Britain, have developed a shift register. According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A shift register is provided with a shift register section composed of a plurality of stages of flip-flops ...
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