Atmel Introduces the World's Lowest Power 32-bit Flash MCU With Ethernet and USB On-the-Go

Atmel Introduces the World's Lowest Power 32-bit Flash MCU With Ethernet and USB On-the-Go

April 03, 2007

AVR32 UC3A Delivers 80 Dhrystone MIPS and Draws Only 40 mA
at 66 MHz


    SAN JOSE, Calif., April 3 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ --
Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) announced today the
industry's lowest power 32-bit Flash microcontrollers.
Based on Atmel's AVR(R)32 UC core, the UC3A Series has 512K
bytes Flash and feature an embedded 10/100 Ethernet MAC, a
full-speed (12 Mbps) USB 2.0 with on-the-go (OTG)
capability and an SRAM/SDRAM external bus interface. The
AT32UC3A0512 and AT32UC3A1512, the first devices available,
deliver 80 Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS) at 66 MHz and consume only
40 mA at 3.3V. The power consumption, as low as 1.65
mW/DMIPS, outperforms other architectures with similar
features by a ratio of up to 4X. The new MCUs target
networking and PC-centric embedded applications and are
especially suited for portable devices.

    The AVR32 UC core uses a three-stage pipeline Harvard
architecture specially designed to optimize instruction
fetches from on-chip Flash memory. It is the first core in
the industry to integrate single-cycle read/write SRAM with
a direct interface to the CPU that bypasses the system bus
to achieve faster execution, cycle determinism and lower
power consumption. The AVR32 UC core shares the same
instruction set architecture (ISA) as its AVR32 AP parent,
with over 220 modeless instructions available as 16-bit
compact and 32-bit extended instructions. The ISA features
atomic bit manipulation to control on-chip peripherals and
general purpose IOs and fixed point DSP arithmetic such as
single cycle fractional saturated multiply-and-accumulate.
An event handling system supports events such as
prioritized interrupts, non-maskable interrupt and internal
exceptions with a maximum interrupt latency of 16 clock
cycles.

    The AVR32 UC3A Series incorporates many of the same
peripherals as Atmel's ARM(R)-based MCUs including the
peripheral DMA controller, multi-layer high speed bus
architecture, 10-bit ADC, two SPIs, SSC, two-wire interface
(I2C compatible), four UARTs, three general purpose timers,
seven pulse width modulators and a full set of supervisory
functions.

    The 10/100-Mbps IEEE(R) 802.3-compliant Ethernet (MAC)
allows designing networked embedded systems that
communicate over internet protocol stacks. The USB 2.0 full
speed (12Mbps) interface provides a means to communicate
with today's PC architecture through various USB classes
such as HID for serial data communication or Mass-Storage
for larger bulked data transfers. The On-The-Go (OTG)
capability of the UC3A USB peripheral gives further
integration opportunity in a PC-centric environment with
the support of standard USB devices such as USB Flash disk,
pointing devices or printers.

    The external bus interface (EBI) extends the
addressable physical memory to 16M bytes. Its
non-multiplexed 16-bit data bus can interface to high
density external SRAM, SDRAM, ROM, Flash devices and
memory-mapped devices such as LCDs or FPGAs. 

    UC3A Series MCUs have a six-layer high speed bus matrix
that enables bus masters peripherals to concurrently access
any bus slave at a maximum speed of 264M bytes per second
at 66 MHz. The bus masters are the AVR32 UC core data and
instruction interfaces, 15-channel peripheral DMA
controller, and several high speed peripherals such as the
Ethernet MAC and USB. The bus slaves are the on-chip SRAM
and Flash memories, USB, the two peripheral bus bridges,
and the external bus interface (EBI). 

    Development Tools. Atmel provides the GNU gcc C
compiler, GNU gdb debugger, FreeRTOS.org real-time kernel
and lwIP TCP/IP protocol stack for the UC3A Series family,
free of charge. Commercial licenses from IAR(R) (Embedded
Workbench), ExpressLogic (ThreadX(R)) and Micrium (uCOS/II)
are also available. Atmel's AVR32 Studio and AVR JTAGICE
mkII, provide the AVR32 UC with a multiplatform integrated
development environment (IDE) already configured for the
GNU tool chain, including support for more advanced
debugging such as real-time trace. The EVK1100 evaluation
kit provides Ethernet and USB interfaces, along with many
other serial communications ports such as SPI, TWI and
USARTS. A 20x4 character LCD and the expansion connector
allow advanced product evaluation and prototyping
activities.

    Availability and Pricing.  The AT32UC3A0512, with EBI,
is available in a 144-pin QFP package and the AT32UC3A1512,
without EBI, is available in a 100-pin QFP package. Pricing
starts at US $8.16 and US $7.43 for 10,000 unit quantities,
respectively. 

    About Atmel

    Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and
manufacture of microcontrollers, advanced logic,
mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF)
components.  Leveraging one of the industry's broadest
intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is
able to provide the electronics industry with complete
system solutions.  Focused on consumer, industrial,
security, communications, computing and automotive markets,
Atmel ICs can be found Everywhere You Are(R).

    NOTE:  Atmel(R), logo and combinations thereof,
Everywhere You Are(R), AVR(R) and others, are registered
trademarks, or trademarks of Atmel Corporation or its
subsidiaries. ARM(R) is a registered trademark of ARM Ltd.
Other terms and product names may be trademarks of others.


     Information:

     Atmel's AVR32 product information is available at
http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR32 .

     IAR:      http://www.iar.com 
     FreeRTOS: http://www.freertos.org/ 
     ThreadX:  http://www.expresslogic.com 
     Micrium:  http://www.micrium.com 
     lwIP:     http://www.sics.se/~adam/lwip/ 



    For more information, please contact:

     Philippe Faure
     Marketing Communications Director - Microcontrollers
     Phone: [phone]
     Email: [e-mail] 

     Helen Perlegos
     Public Relations - USA and Asia Pacific Rim
     Phone: [phone]
     Email: [e-mail]

     Veronique Sablereau
     Corporate Communications Manager - Europe
     Phone: [phone]
     Fax:   [phone]
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