# About chipKIT™ Max32™ by Digilent The chipKIT™ Max32™ is based on the popular Arduino™ open source hardware prototyping platform, but it adds the performance of the Microchip PIC32 microcontroller. The Max32 is the same form factor as the Arduino Mega board and is compatible with many Arduino™ shields, as well as larger shields for use with the Mega boards. It features a USB serial port interface for connection to the IDE and can be powered via USB or via an external power supply. The Max32 board takes advantage of the powerful PIC32MX795F512 microcontroller. This microcontroller features a 32-bit MIPS processor core running at 80 MHz, 512K of flash program memory and 128K of SRAM data memory. In addition, the processor provides a USB 2 OTG controller, 10/100 Ethernet MAC and dual CAN controllers that can be accessed via add-on I/O shields. The Max32 can be programmed using MPIDE which is an integerated development environment based on the original Arduino IDE but it has been modified to support PIC32 (while still supporting Arduino boards). In addition, the Max32 is fully compatible with the advanced Microchip MPLAB® IDE and the PICKit3 in-system programmer/debugger.