Guard channel feature and low voltage operation makes device ideal for portable products

Southampton, UK, September 15, 2008…AtmelR Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML), announced today the AT42QT1060, a touch control chip that integrates 6 channels of touch sensing with the ability to drive up to 7 low current LEDs directly through a pulse width modulated (PWM) output function. The device operates from 5.5VDC down to 1.8VDC and consumes less than 1uA in standby mode to give long battery life; it comes in a tiny 4mm x 4mm MLF28 package, making it ideal for use in mobile phones and other handheld devices. The AT42QT1060 is the latest addition to Atmel's comprehensive range of capacitive touch controllers based on Quantum Research Group's charge-transfer technology. These include QTouch™ and QMatrix™ based controllers for single and multiple touch buttons, touch sliders and touch wheels.

The AT42QT1060 is designed for use in portable electronics products. An inbuilt capacitive guard channel feature helps prevent false triggering, for example, where moisture is an issue. This feature also prevents against erroneous commands that can occur when devices such as MP3 players are carried in a pocket, or in the case of a cellular phone, when it is held against the ear. The highly integrated AT42QT1060 reduces component count, cutting design complexity and cost, and enabling faster product development.

The sensor chip is based on Quantum's patented QTouch™ charge-transfer sensing method. This robust technology uses spread-spectrum modulation to achieve high immunity to electrical noise and a patented technique - Adjacent Key Suppression™ (AKS™) - ensures that only the intended key is activated by the touch of a finger. The guard channel feature uses AKSTM to eliminate false triggering of nearby keys. Long-term reliability is ensured because the device automatically re-calibrates on power-up, compensating for build-up of moisture or other contaminants on the touch surface. Individual key sensitivity is host-selectable.

A host wake up function allows the host to sleep and be woken up when a user triggers the corresponding input, providing another power-saving feature. Additional GPIO expansion can be achieved by the use of spare IC pins.

The AT42QT1060 functions through any insulating panel including glass or plastic up to 3mm thick. Electrodes can be made from copper, silver, carbon, indium tin oxide (ITO) or Orgacon conductive ink and must be 6 x 6mm or larger. Widely different electrode sizes and shapes are possible, giving the product designer great flexibility in tailoring the user interface.

Facilitates Low-cost, Easy Evaluation of CAP Capabilities

San Jose, CA, September 2, 2008…AtmelR Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML), today announced its AT91CAP7A-STK Starter Kit for the evaluation of its ARM7™-based CAP™ family of customizable microcontrollers. CAP7 customizable MCUs allow designers to migrate ARM7-plus-FPGA designs to a low-NRE, single-chip solution with approximately 30% lower unit costs, with eight times better performance, 98% less static power consumption, and 70% less active power consumption.

The $399 CAP7 Starter Kit includes a printed circuit board with Atmel's ARM7-based AT91CAP7E microcontroller, Altera® Cyclone®II EP2C8F256C7N FPGA with EPCS4SI8N serial configuration memory, 2.8" TFT LCD panel, joystick, 64M Bytes of SDRAM application memory, 10-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), 256M Bytes of NAND flash and a 4MB DataFlash®. External interfaces include USB full-speed device, four analog inputs, external bus interface (EBI), USART, SPI, and Debug UART. The board also supports sensing applications with light and temperature sensors and potentiometers.

The on-board Cyclone II FPGA contains 8,256 four-input Lookup Table (LUTs) logic elements equivalent to 66,048 CAP7 MP block gates – about one seventh the total available logic on a CAP7 device. It can be used to map and emulate application-specific IP blocks, in the CAP7’s embedded Metal Programmable (MP) block, along with the system software. The AT91CAP7E executes at clock speeds up to 80 MHz and can send to or receive data from the FPGA at this speed over the EBI. The AT91CAP7E can also interface the FPGA via peripheral IO (PIO).

The CAP7 starter kit allows designers to determine how the software, MCU and new IP will play together in a customizable MCU, without incurring any NRE charges or spending thousands of dollars for a full development board. Designers can accurately gauge the superior power consumption and performance characteristics of the CAP7 device, evaluate the ADC resolution, and experiment with the peripherals on the device. Smaller designs can be emulated and evaluated on the AT91CAP7A-STK. However for development of a customized CAP7 device, the fully featured AT91CAP7-DK is recommended to allow customers to take full advantage of the CAP7's multi-layer high-speed bus (AHB) and peripheral DMA.

There are 32 general-purpose I/O connections on the AT91CAP7E, and 75 I/Os on the FPGA to support application-specific external interfaces. Debug is facilitated by the provision of an ICE-JTAG interface for CAP7 JTAG programming, and a USB-Blaster-JTAG interface for Cyclone II JTAG programming.

Jay Johnson, Atmel's Marketing Director for ASIC Products, commented, "Development boards with an ARM7 and FPGA usually cost thousands of dollars. The $399 CAP7 starter kit is the first ARM7-plus FPGA kit to provide a low cost alternative for evaluating these designs and for validating the CAP7 concept, without any NRE charges or risk. This kit can be used by anyone from a developer in a tier-one electronics company to the smallest startup to find out how easy it is to customize an ARM-based MCU for a specific application. It is also the ideal vehicle for students of electronics engineering to consolidate their knowledge of system-on-chip hardware and software design."

Atmel announced two new low power 32-pin tinyAVRR microcontrollers, the ATtiny48 and ATtiny88 devices which have 4- and 8-Kbytes of Flash memory, respectively. These AVRR microcontrollers consume less than 240 uA at 1.8V and 1 MHz, and below 100 nA in power-down mode and are especially suited for portable and power sensitive systems such as remote control, accessories and small appliances.

The new tinyAVR microcontrollers utilize Atmel's industry leading picoPower™ technology that eliminates unnecessary power consumption. They have a zero power brown-out detection circuitry that can be turned off during sleep modes, a power reduction register that powers down individual peripherals, and digital input disable registers that remove leakage current on ADC input pins.

The ATtiny48/88 operates from 1.8 to 5.5 volts and features a 10-bit ADC, SPI, I2C interface, internal temperature sensor, and have up to 12 MIPS throughput at 12 MHz. Like all the other AVR microcontrollers, the ATtiny48/88 features an on-chip debug system for easy, fast, and robust development.

"Atmel's successful picoPower megaAVRR devices offer the best-in-class power saving features and performance. The ATtiny48/88 is now extending the reach, offering an affordable solution for applications that require very low power consumption and are very cost sensitive. Our customers in the consumer electronics market want to develop products that consume less and less power, and the new ATtiny48/88 are a perfect fit," said Jukka Eskelinen, Director of tinyAVR Product Marketing.

All tinyAVR microcontrollers use the standard AVR microcontroller development tools. The AVR StudioR AVR integrated development environment is available free of charge on Atmel's web site.

Samples for the ATtiny48 are available now, the ATtiny88 will be available in 3Q2008 in the following packages QFN32, QFN28, TQFP32 and PDIP28

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

The kit allows an easy evaluation of short range wireless connectivity with IEEE802.15.4, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, etc.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- AtmelR Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML - News) announced today the availability of the AVRR RZ Raven evaluation kit that provides designers a unique ready-to-use development platform in the rapidly growing low power wireless market for the 2.4GHz ISM frequency band available worldwide.

The kit utilizes the AVR picoPower(TM) technology in combination with the superior RF performance offered by the AT86RF230 2.4 GHz ISM transceiver.

The RZ Raven kit comprises two Raven boards, one USB Stick and a selection of firmware application and software that will dramatically reduce time to market for designers considering short range wireless ISM band applications based on IEEE802.15.4(TM), ZigBeeR or 6LoWPAN.

The Raven board can be used as a multi application wireless node with a LCD graphical user interface. It has two AVR picoPower microcontrollers: an ATmega1284P that can be used to control RF application stacks, and an ATmega3290P that controls the display and user interfaces. The Raven contains a custom LCD display, a 5 position joystick, a microphone and a speaker allowing the evaluation of a variety of user interactions that are appropriate in the target wireless applications.

To support application development the following functionalities are available: graphical user interface, communication ports, ATmega1284P port pins available on headers, on-board temperature sensor, voltage sensor, relay driver, boot loader and ISP support for programming.

The USB stick can serve as a PC gateway to the wireless network, or as the hardware platform for wireless protocol analyzer. It is based on the AT90USB1287 AVR microcontroller and the AT86RF230 transceiver.

The firmware provided includes low level drivers and application stacks enabling simple point to point communication, IEEE 802.15.4 compliant solutions, and more complex applications based on ZigBee and 6LoWPAN. Updated source code, libraries and documentation for the applications are available from the Atmel web site. PC software is also provided, including a demo and a management suite for setup, configuration and management of wireless networks. Key features include wireless protocol analyzer and Over-The-Air upgrade (OTA).

"Customers selecting the AVR Wireless platform get a flexible solution with a wide selection of microcontrollers tailored for any wireless application," said Magnus Pedersen, Director of AVR Product Marketing. "Combining the superior RF performance and the extremely low power consumption of picoPower technology, Atmel provides an ideal platform for the rapidly growing market of low power wireless devices demanding years of life on a single battery."

The AT86RF230 offers industry best RF performance with a link budget of 104 dB and gives up to 3 times the range of competitor radios. This results in an outdoor range of up to 700 m with the high gain PCB antenna used on the Raven board. Current consumption in active mode is only 15 mA and down to 20 nA in sleep mode.

AVR picoPower devices consume as little as 340 uA in active mode at 1.8V running from the internal RC oscillator at 1 MHz. In power-save mode it is 500 nA with a real time counter running, and 100 nA in power-down mode. picoPower AVRs are pin-, performance-, and code-compatible with existing AVR microcontrollers giving designers flexible hardware options for small, medium sized and complex wireless networks.

The Raven board and the USB Stick holds FCC and ETSI certification.

For technical info, please visit http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=4291