Electronic – How to interface MIPI DSI with a microcontroller

Here is some references of MCUs with high PWM outputs (> 12)

• Freescale Kinetis K10 @ 120 MHz series (ARM-Based) : 2x8ch + 2x2ch = 20 PWM channels
• A small number of dsPIC33 have a high number of PWM output:
  • dsPIC33EP256MU814 : up to 30 PWM outputs
  • dsPIC33FJ64GS610 : up to 22 PWM outputs
• Atmel 32-bit AVR MCU have some references with high PWM outputs:
  • ATUC256L3U : up to 36 PWM channels

But as Wouter van Ooijen said in a comment, maybe you should review your architecture and instead of using one big MCU with many PWM outputs, you should use one small MCU for each "component" (SMPS, motor, etc.), and use one big MCU for the general control of all other MCUs. This will lead to a more flexible design: you can add a motor simply by adding a small controlling MCU and linked to the big one in SPI or I2C.

For the CPLD/FPGA approach, you can take a look at Lattice ice40 CPLD and to this reference design : MxN Channel PWM Do some searchs about PWM on Altera and Xilinx website to have other CPLD references.

Arduino IS based on a microcontroller (by atmel) and is basically a breakout board for such microcontroller plus some friendly way to upload a program to it.

It's programmable in c++ so it's quite easy and, as @Michael said, the community is huge. You can use the program on a bare chip without the board if you provide the proper connections, parts etc...

That said i'm a PIC user and i don't really like the bulkiness of arduino (both in terms of price, physical space and memory occupied by the bootloader) and the way its community works.

BUT if you want to program a pic or an avr you need an external not-so-cheap programmer (search for pickit2 or avr dragon...way more than an arduino) and a proper c compiler. Then remember that usb access comes at a price (i.e. writing a program to use it but then you need a way to program the chip in the first place!).

Arduino has everything you need to start FAST and such a program would be nearly trivial with all the libraries, a thing i wouldn't dare to say for a "from scratch" project like yours. Then again, if you want to learn bare embedded programming just grab a micro, buy or build a programmer, download the tools and start by blinking a LED then build from that. I'd advocate for PICs but really it doesn't matter. AVRs have nice open source tools while PICs are slightly cheaper. You'll find hundreds, thousands of discussions on which is best and why they're wrong :P