Nuvoton reference application: Game Controllers

[NuvotonMarcom]

The gaming industry has flourished in recent years, and various gaming products have been released. In order to satisfy the needs of gamers, high-end game controllers have become basic equipment for gamers. In competitive games where every second count, the response speed and control accuracy of game controllers are very important, and how to achieve high response speed and high precision controls have become major issues when companies develop products. In somatosensory type games, positioning and orientation functions are needed for controllers to allow gamers to use the controllers as props or rackets in the game and achieve somatosensory operation functions and use vibrating motors to provide dynamic feedback from game scenarios to allow gamers to immerse in the game even more. These functions help gamers win the game and provide ideal gaming experiences.

The Nuvoton NuMicro® M482 microcontroller based on the Arm Cortex®-M4F core with a clock speed of 192 MHz is able to satisfy the various interface functions needed to develop game controllers. In terms of control, it has as many as 16 channels of 5 MSPS 12-bit ADC to detect the control angle of the analog stick in real-time, able to provide 4096 levels of control resolution; data can also be transmitted to the PC or other game consoles through the full speed USB 2.0 device function, and wireless transmission can be performed with the host by using a Bluetooth model with the UART interface. In terms of somatosensory, there are three I²C interfaces that are used to connect a gyro and an accelerometer sensor to detect the direction and rotation angle of the game controller, and then through the high speed computation performance of M482 with a floating-point unit (FPU) and digital signal processing (DSP) instructions, the execution of 3D algorithms is effectively improved to simulate actual actions of gamers. It is also equipped with 24 channels of 16-bit resolution PWM output, able to control the vibration motor to make the game controller vibrate with game scenarios and improving game presence for gamers.

Using Nuvoton NuMicro® M482 microcontroller as the core of game controllers provides rich peripheral functions and powerful computational capabilities not only for the basic development of game controllers, it can also help developers to realize innovative ideas and improve the performances and functions of next-generation products.