Atmel's integrated LCD Controller

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]

Atmel 32-bit AVR UC3L

A 32-bit microcontroller that lowers power consumption by 90%, Atmel claims to have to answer.

Incorporating Atmel picoPower® technology, designed to reduce power consumption in both active & sleep modes while still enabling quick reaction from any sleep mode, the 32-bit AVR UC3L lowers static power consumption by 90% & active power consumption by 45%, enabling a power/performance ratio unsurpassed in the MCU market according to Atmel.

The RISC core is capable of 64 DMIPS (Dhrysone MIPS) at 50MHz & incorporates DSP instructions. Static power consumption is said to be lower than the tantalum capacitor decoupling the board power supply & comparable to leakage currents in even the most advanced battery technologies at 9nA, while active power consumption has been reduced to 165 µA/MHz, a 45% improvement from previous generations.

On board, the AVR UC3L incorporates a built-in capacitive touch peripheral, up to 64Kb high-speed flash & 16KB high-speed SRAM. The on-chip memory also includes FlashVault technology that allows secured libraries to be programmed into the device. These libraries can then be executed while the CPU is Secure State, but not read by non-secure software in the device. The device can thus be shipped to end costumers, who will be able to program their own code into the device, accessing the secure libraries, but without risk of compromising the proprietary secure code.

Also included is a PES (Peripheral Event System) that allows peripherals to receive, react & send peripherals events without CPU interaction, six 16-bit timer/counter channels, four USART's, one master/slave SPI, two master & two slave TWI's, one 8-channel ADC. In addition PWM channels are available on all I/O pins.

The series is available in 48-pin QFP, QFN & TLLGA packages down to a 5.5 x 5.5mm size. The AVR UC3L is supported by an evaluation kit (AT32UC3L-EK) which demonstrates the power saving features & Atmel's QTouch® peripheral hardware module. This kit is also fully compatible with all Atmel AVR debuggers.

Designed for cost sensitive embedded applications, with particular emphasis on low power consumption, high code density & high performance - this device moves in the territory that was previously only addressable by ASICs.

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

Useful links
Atmel [www.atmel.com]