Is any chip available with USART and 16 bit DAC ? I know many PICs have ADC, but I'm looking for embedded chips with 16 bit DAC. The 16F1789 has 8 bit and 5 bit DACs. That's all I can find.


Dan

 

A handful of dsPICs such as the dsPIC33FJ128GP804 have 16 bit DACs built in.

 

What waveforms are you outputting from the DAC? Do you need to reproduce audio waveforms or is the DAC just needed to make a slowish changing DC voltage that you can finely adjust?

If so, you can make a number of high resolution DACs in software to a single PIC digital output pin, and RC filter it to a DC voltage that you can control with high resolution.

For instance it's pretty trivial to make a sigma-delta converter in software that has 1 million "steps" in the output voltage, which is way more than 16bit DAC resolution.

 

I plan on making a music synthesizer. I know that this can be done with PWM but the sounds that I have heard produced with PWM are too thin for a serious musical instrument. 32 bits would even be better !!

Thanks THE_RB !!

Dan

 

Then Blueroom was right on the money, you need a serious DSP chip to produce live (high quality) sound synthesis.

Even a 10bit PWM on an old PIC 18F etc can make some pretty good sound, the main problem will not be the DAC output it will be the processing speed, especially if you want stereo which takes twice as much processing. That really becomes a job for a DSP PIC.

The project sounds very interesting, please keep us in the loop as it progresses.

 

I'm working on a C64 MIDI interface for the 16F887 and was hoping to save the code for the synthesizer but the code looks very different for the DSP. It looks more like 8080 or 386 assembler on the DSP.

Dan

 

I would not bother trying to do DSP in assembler. If you really want a large ROM fast PIC with lots of processing power, looking up lots of data etc, that is the type of app that really suits coding in C.

 

I plan on reading large tables in C, but other things like some of my effects are accomplished in Assembler.

Dan