Microchip 32bit Microcontroller Programming Courses - An overview
The PIC32 marked a great departure for Microchip. Prior to that the cores of their 8bit and 16bit microcontroller families had been designed "in house". When embarking on the development of a 32bit microcontroller architecture amongst the options to be considered were, for example, basing their new 32 bit processor on an ARM processor core, or some other 32 bit processor core, or designing a new 32 bit processor core from scratch. The choice Microchip made was to base their new core on the MIPS processor architecture. The MIPS architecture has been in existence for a long time and many tools and compilers have been developed for it. The other decision that had to be made was to either develop a new C compiler from scratch, or base their compiler on some existing C compiler for the MIPS processor architecture. Microchip chose to base their compiler on the GNU C Compiler, and then to add a whole lot of non open source optimisation mechanisms. The original C32 compiler used with MPLAB has now been updated to the XC32 compiler used within the MPLABX IDE. More recently Microchip has added C++ compilation capabilities to the XC32 compiler, though not all the features contained in the new C++11 standard.
The Microchip 32 bit microcontroller programming curriculum courses cover the currently most required topics which include assembly language programming, basic and advanced C programming, programming USB and programming Wireless applications. We can also provide CAN programming and application development courses if required. Because the dsPIC is designed for DSP programming this curriculum also includes a specific DSP programming module that can serve as either an introduction or refresher to DSP theory and concepts, and to DSP C programming.