The MAX32600 microcontroller from Maxim is a winner

As all engineers know very well, there are many, many ICs out there for use with the IoT. For us there was one standout in all of last year’s introductions — Product of the Year Award winner MAX32600.

The MAX32600 Wellness Measurement Microcontroller from Maxim Integrated features four operational amplifiers, four comparators, four SPST analog switches, four ground switches, eight 100-mA LED drivers, a 16-bit A/D converter with input mux and PGA, and two 12-bit plus two 8-bit D/A converters. It has a Cortex M3 and the entire IC takes only 175 μA/MHz. This chip is especially useful for wearable medical applications including blood glucose, galvanic skin response, and pulse oximetry measurements.

We asked the folks a Maxim how this chip came about. As they were developing products for the portable medical device market they saw the emerging wearable market on the horizon. The design teams in Colorado Springs and Dallas wanted a microcontroller that would appeal to a wide audience in this area and be a real system-on-a-chip solution. There were many considerations to sort through.

They chose an ARM Cortex-M3 as the core and chose to hook their wagon to Bluetooth Low Energy as well. While the MAX32600 doesn’t include Bluetooth, it does support easily adding this function. John Di Cristina, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, said the team wanted the right functionality and hooks to work with optical and electrochemical sensors. And, they decided to integrate hardware security blocks that are critical to privacy, authentication, and safety for connected medical devices. “All these decisions were the right decisions as we look back today, but when they were defining this product years ago, it wasn’t that clear” John said. And with everything that was integrated into the MAX32600, great effort and thought was given to have very low power operation.

The award winning design team from Maxim.

Sam Johnson, Principal Member of Technical Staff, said that to meet the needs of many applications that the team looked at, the DacOpMatrix was born. By combining D/A converters of different capabilities, multiple programmable references, multiple op amp types, comparators, I/O, and several switching groups the DacOpMatrix made the chip configurable. It also aided in power savings by cutting off unneeded functions. Nearly any analog input can connect to any function, or any output to several pins and there is a the highly configurable A/D converter.

Prem Nayar, Maxim's Executive Business Manager, said the IC has been very successful and is just the first in a family of MCUs targeted at wearables.