Atmel Corporation has announced the availability of an integrated LCD controller into its popular AVR XMEGA microcontroller family.

Designed to lower the overall system costs, the LCD controller offers ultra-low power consumption for applications, including smart meters, home automation, climate control and other applications that may require a small graphical user interface.

By integrating all of the features required to run a segment in an LCD display, the controller will reduce the overall design complexity. The device, which also includes an innovative SWAP mode, enables developers to internally re-route the LCD signals, thus making PCB designing a lot easier.

The AVR XMEGA LCD controller can support displays with up to 160 segments, boasting built in contrast control, ASCII character mapping and programmable segment blinking.

Atmel's AVR XMEGA microcontrollers have low power consumption as they utilise the Atmel picoPower technology; these new devices impressively use less than a third of current compared to existing megaAVR LCD controllers, requiring only 3µA to run the LCD display in sleep mode. The versatile LCD controller is also able to support up to 4x40 and 4x25 segments on the 100-pin and 64-pin AVR XMEGA microcontrollers, respectively.

Combining both LCD and USB capabilities the new AVR XMEGA MCU range will still include all the original features of the existing AVR XMEGA family, including high-precision 12-bit analog, real-time performance, and Atmel patented ultra-low picoPower technology.

For more information please contact Atmel [www.atmel.com]

Useful links
Atmel [www.atmel.com]