Quote Originally Posted by Jerson View Post
Squarepants

Welcome to the forum.

You havent mentioned what you really want to do and with which PIC. Will multiplexed LEDs suit your need ? What is your intended application? Why the particular chips you mention? These clarifications and I'm sure, someone will be able to help you out.
What I want is independent control of the 16 (or more) LEDs while removing most of the resources from the PIC side. If that makes any sense. I want to be able to still use the majority of the other I/O ports on the pic for other things while not being burdened by constantly controlling the 16 (or more) LEDs... Also the use of a driver chips increases the source/sink levels and allows me to limit all channels current with a single resistor. Lower parts count and smaller circuit size. I figure even for basic applications the single chip replaces darlington arrays and multiple current limiting resistors, lowering the parts count almost immediately.

As for the particular chips I mentioned only because I have those on hand, any 16 channel controller will work, not picky at all right now, and I'm open to other chips... The reason I want to go this way instead of multiplexing is the ability to cascade these chips and expand to lots of LEDs while not increasing the number of used I/O pins on the chip... If my understanding is correct, I should be able to control 100s of LED independently from even a pic16f628a with plenty of left over I/O lines by cascading the controller chips. Multiplexing directly off the pic in the end (unless I'm missing some trick) will incur substantially more parts and I/O lines as the number of LEDs increase.

Hope that clarifies things.