The LM8333 Mobile I/O Companion offloads the burden of keyboard scanning from the host, while providing extremely low power consumption in both operational and standby modes. It supports keypad matrices up to 8 × 8 in size (plus another 8 special-function keys), for portable applications such as cellphones, PDAs, games, and other handheld applications.

Key press and release events are encoded into a byte format and loaded into a FIFO buffer for retrieval by the host processor. An interrupt output (IRQ) is used to signal events such as keypad activity, a state change on either of two interrupt-capable general-purpose I/O pins, or an error condition. Interrupt and error codes are available to the host by reading dedicated registers.

Four general-purpose I/O pins are available, two of which have interrupt capability. A pulse-width modulated output based on a host-programmable internal timer is also available, which can be used as a general-purpose output if the PWM function is not required.Read more