Flash microcontrollers promise true 1.6V operation

Ultralow power consumption is combined with fast 12bit analogue functions, a DMA controller, an innovative event system and a crypto engine.

New from Atmel, the AVR XMEGA family is billed as an important addition to the company's successful AVR microcontrollers.

The system performance of AVR XMEGA expands the market reach for 8/16bit microcontrollers.

With second generation of picoPower technology, XMEGA is the only family of Flash microcontrollers with true 1.6V operation.

The ultralow power consumption is combined with fast 12bit analogue functions, a DMA controller, an innovative event system and a crypto engine.

All features free CPU resources which minimise power consumption and increase system performance.

"With a modern AVR CPU, Atmel is capable to serve both the 8- and 16bit microcontroller market", says Ingar Fredriksen, Atmel's AVR Product Marketing Director.

"Many competitors are forced to offer 32bit solutions since their old 8 or 16bit CPU does not meet the customer's requirements".

"However, they struggle with price, power consumption, ease of use, EMC performance and analogue features".

"AVR XMEGA combines Atmel's picoPower technology with extended task-handling capability and advanced peripherals in a large family of devices".

The XMEGA microcontrollers range from 16 to 384Kbyte of Flash and 44- to 100-pin packages.

They operate from 1.6 to 3.6V and achieve up to 32MIPS at 32MHz.

The XMEGA devices are general purpose microcontrollers well suited for a variety of applications including audio systems, ZigBee, power tools, medical, board controllers, networking, metering, optical transceivers, motor control, white goods and any battery powered product.

Atmel's picoPower technology already used in megaAVR products, is recognised as market leader in low power.

With AVR XMEGA, using second generation picoPower, battery life is further increased by additional features like true 1.6V operation and a combined watchdog timer and brown out detector current consumption of only 1uA.

True 1.6V operation means all functions including Flash reprogramming, EEPROM write, analogue conversions and internal oscillators are operative.

In battery powered applications like mobile phones, XMEGA devices can be connected to a 1.8V (+/-10%) regulated power supply to save cost and increase battery life.

AVR XMEGA delivers industry leading power consumption numbers.

In Power Down mode with RAM retention, current consumption is 100nA.

A real-time clock function using a 32kHz crystal oscillator has a power consumption of only 650nA.

The 8/16bit AVR CPU is designed for high-level languages like C.

It has 16 and 32bit arithmetic support and 16 and 24bit memory pointers.

Single cycle operation and 32 working registers connected to the arithmetic logic unit makes AVR more efficient than other CPUs.

Based on the solid AVR CPU platform, Atmel now offers one of the largest families of code compatible devices ranging from 1Kbyte 8-pin tinyAVR to 384Kbyte 100-pin XMEGA.

By standardising on AVR MCUs, customers save investments and shorten time to market by reusing development tools, software and hardware design.

Like a reflex in the human body, the innovative XMEGA event system enables interperipheral communication without CPU or DMA usage.

This ensures 100% predictable and short response time.

Up to eight simultaneous events or interrupt conditions in the peripherals can automatically start actions in other peripherals.

The event system removes bottlenecks associated with multiple and/or frequently triggering interrupts.

There is no software overhead and critical tasks are handled with a guaranteed latency shorter than any interrupt response time.

The XMEGA analogue-to-digital convertor has 12bit resolution and provides up to 2Msample/s with hardware support for oversampling to increase resolution to 16bit without extra cost.

Programmable gain stage, differential inputs, temperature sensor, and accurate internal voltage references removes external components and saves cost.

AVR XMEGA also includes 12bit digital-to-analogue convertors and advanced analogue comparators.

XMEGA has a hardware crypto engine that supports Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Data Encryption Standard (DES).

The crypto engine increases encrypted communication speed from 10Kbit/s to 2Mbit/s compared with software solutions.

AVR XMEGA is the only solution for high bandwidth encrypted data communication in long life battery powered applications, like toll road tags, wireless sensor nodes and ZigBee.

AVR XMEGA is supported by the easy-to-use tool chain already existing for AVR devices.

The AVR Studio integrated development environment is available free of charge on Atmel's website.

The STK600 starter kit and JTAGICE mkII on-chip debugger supports every microcontroller in Atmel's AVR and AVR32 UC3 product families.

The first devices, ATxmega128A1 and ATxmega64A1 are both offered in 100-pin TQFP and BGA packages and are available now.

Volume prices for 10,000 units are US $3.75 and US $3.50, respectively.

Other XMEGA devices will be available during 2Q or 3Q of 2008.

Back to top