Fraunhofer helps with customisable MCU designs

The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits will assist with customer designs for the metal programmable portion of the AT91CAP customisable microcontroller.

Atmel is working with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits to develop SoCs for mutual clients.

Atmel's AT91CAP ARM-based customisable microcontroller is the enabling technology for this collaboration that allows application developers to customise the MCU to their specific requirements.

Fraunhofer IIS will provide complementary design support.

Fraunhofer IIS will work together with clients to transform their design specifications into netlists for the metal programmable portion of the AT91CAP customisable microcontroller, complementing IP blocks from Atmel's extensive libraries with IP from Fraunhofer IIS as required.

The netlists will be validated on the AT91CAP emulation board by mapping them onto the built-in FPGA, before being transferred to Atmel for metal programming of the AT91CAP platform.

Together the customer and Fraunhofer IIS, prior to customer signoff for fabrication, will perform post-layout simulation.

Michel Le Lan, Atmel's Marketing Director for ASIC products, comments: "Atmel is pleased to add Fraunhofer IIS to its expanding network of CAP design centres".

"Fraunhofer's depth of knowledge and accumulated experience in system-on-chip design, particularly for audio, video and multimedia applications, and also for medical systems, will enable our mutual clients to achieve complex designs in a short timescale, exploiting to the maximum the possibilities of the CAP architecture".

"Atmel's CAP architecture is very interesting due to its FPGA based verification approach".

"This allows early software development with system validation in hardware and reduces the overall design risk".

"The customisable part of CAP gives a lot of flexibility to extend the functionality of the predefined ARM core by adding logic and memories, e.g for coprocessor structures, as well as optional interfaces".

"Another positive aspect is the short turnaround time and the attractive price", says Norbert Schuhmann, Group Manager Design Services at Fraunhofer IIS.

Atmel's AT91CAP is an ARM microcontroller-based SoC with fast local memory, a wide range of industry-standard peripherals and interfaces, and a metal programmable (MP) block that allows the designer to add custom logic.

By combining the performance, density and low power consumption of the fixed portion of the device with the flexibility of the MP block, CAP enables application-specific products to be developed in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of standard-cell ASICs, but at a unit price close to that of standard cell devices.

CAP also offers superior performance, smaller form factor and lower power consumption at a unit price significantly lower than an MCU-plus-FPGA combination for the same functionality.

CAP is fully supported with an emulation board, software development tools, operating systems and code modules to facilitate application software development.

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