Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: Atmel Corporation | Subject: SAM9 MCUs
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 06 June 2006
ARM9-based MCUs take over power-hungry
tasks
The industry's first family of ARM9-based Flash microcontrollers is optimised for real-time embedded applications that have outgrown the 50 to 60MIPS limitation of on an ARM7.
Atmel has released the industry's first family of ARM9-based Flash microcontrollers optimised for real-time embedded applications that have outgrown the 50 to 60MIPS limitation of on an ARM7 Atmel's SAM9 controllers are the world's only ARM9-based controllers that offer a direct upward migration path from ARM7 devices without giving up system integration
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 18 Nov 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Based on the ARM926EJ-S, Atmel's SAM9 controllers share common integration levels, peripheral sets, and programming models with Atmel's SAM7 MCUs, radically simplifying migration between the two families.
Tuned for real-time applications, SAM9 MCUs include a real-time clock, interrupt controller, watchdog timer, power-on-reset, brownout-detect, RC-oscillator and single-cycle instruction fetch from on-chip memory.
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As embedded systems evolve, new software-based features are added (such as encryption, file systems, GPS, audio, or wired and wireless networking), increasing the processing load on the MCU.
In addition, the amount of data that must be processed also tends to increase as more communications links are integrated in a single chip.
Finally, designers frequently migrate to more advanced algorithms that require more computation.
The basic application doesn't change it is just better, more accurate, more fully featured, and requires much more bandwidth to execute.
Getting the extra throughput has traditionally meant redoing the design from scratch using a high-throughput ASSP, with no support for real-time execution and requires the use of a complex and difficult to learn operating system, such as Linux or WinCE.
Atmel's SAM9 controllers are the first ARM9-based microcontrollers with Flash memory integrated on the same chip.
A variety of family members will be announced in 2006 and 2007 with Flash memory densities ranging up to 1024Kbyte.
Integrated Flash memory offers better performance and lower power consumption versus stacked die implementations.
The first SAM9 family member, the SAM9260 will be available in June of 2006 and will be priced around $6 in volumes of 100,000 units.
Atmel will launch additional SAM9 controllers with varying Flash densities during 2006 and 2007.
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