Atmel Extends Battery Life With Its New picoPower AVR MCUs

San Jose, California (ots/PRNewswire) -

- picoPower Technology Slashes Power Drain to 650 nA in Power-save
& 100 nA in Power-down

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML), announced today the first two
AVR(R) microcontrollers to incorporate a power-saving technology that
provides multi-year battery-life in lighting control, security,
keyless entry, ZigBee(TM) and other applications that spend most of
their time in sleep mode. The picoPower(TM) technology reduces
"power-save" power consumption to as little as 650 nA, even with the
32 kHz clock running and superior brown-out detection, the industry's
lowest.

The two picoPower devices now available are the ATmega169P with a
4x25 segment LCD controller, and the ATmega165P general purpose
microcontroller. Both microcontrollers have 16 Kbytes of Flash
memory, 512 Bytes EEPROM and 1 Kbytes SRAM. They feature a 10-bit
ADC, USART, SPI, Two-Wire-Interface and operate from 1.8 to 5.5 volt
with up to 16 MIPS throughput. Fourteen additional 8-bit picoPower
AVR microcontrollers will be added within the next twelve months.

picoPower microcontrollers consume down to 340 uA in active mode,
150 uA in idle mode at 1 MHz, 650 nA in power-save mode and 100 nA in
power-down mode. They will be pin-, performance- and code-compatible
with existing AVR microcontrollers.

According to Asmund Saetre, Atmel's AVR marketing manager,
"Multi-year battery lives are becoming mandatory in a wide variety of
applications. People don't really relish the idea of changing the
battery in their car key or home HVAC system. Battery life has become
so important that it is even a part of the ZigBee specification.
ZigBee end-products must have a battery life of at least two years or
they won't be certified.

"The systems for which we developed picoPower share one attribute;
they spend most of their time doing nothing, but have features that
draw unnecessary power even when they are in sleep mode. Although
saving a few nanoAmps here and there may not seem like a big deal, in
systems that spend the vast majority of their time inactive,
incremental improvements in sleep mode power consumption can add
years to the battery life of the end-product. Atmel has focused on
eliminating or drastically reducing the power drain from oscillators,
brown-out detectors, I/O pin leakage and the like to achieve the
lowest power MCUs on the market," Saetre concluded.

Atmel's picoPower technology utilizes a variety of innovative
techniques that eliminate unnecessary power consumption in power-down
modes. These include an ultra low power 32 kHz crystal oscillator,
automatic disabling and re-enabling of brown out detection (BOD)
circuitry during sleep modes, a power reduction register (PRR) that
completely powers down individual peripherals, and digital input
disable registers that turn off the digital inputs to specific pins.

300 nA 32 kHz Real Time Clock (RTC). Many systems must keep track
of time even when they are powered down. Atmel has been optimized its
32 kHz crystal oscillator to let the total power consumption of the
device with a RTC be as low as 650 nA.

2 uS Accurate BOD with Sleep Mode. Brown-Out Detectors (BOD)
detect when the power supply falls below the threshold required for
operation and then issue a power-on-reset to protect valuable data.
Without this protection, a power failure could cause catastrophic
damage to the controller and make it inoperable. The accuracy of BODs
is directly proportional to the current they consume. Low- or
zero-power BODs tend to be both slow and inaccurate, while more
accurate, faster BODs consume a lot of power. Since BODs usually
remain on in sleep mode, they represent a substantial drag on battery
life. As a result, most vendors of ultra-low power MCUs, sacrifice
accuracy and speed to lower current consumption.

Atmel has taken a new approach, by creating a BOD with enough
current to provide accurate detection at 1.8, 2.7 and 4.5V with 2
microseconds response time. Power is saved by automatically disabling
the BOD during sleep mode and re-enabling it when the controller
wakes up - before it executes any instructions. This approach
provides superior protection with substantially less power drain.

Digital Input Disable Registers. Low pin-count MCUs frequently mix
analog-to-digital-conversion (ADC) and digital IO on the same pins.
This can lead to current leakage through the digital IO buffer. Atmel
has solved this problem with a dedicated input disable register
(DIDR) that let the software disconnect all digital buffers from
inputs that are used for ADC readings.

Power Reduction Register. A power reduction register (PRR) on
picoPower AVR MCUs contains control bits for disabling the entire
clock distribution to unused peripheral modules. The power reduction
register is controlled by software that allows the user to turn on
and off peripheral modules at any time. The current state is frozen
and all I/O registers are inaccessible when the peripheral module is
disabled by the power reduction register. When re-enabled, the
peripheral module continues in the same state as before it was
disabled. Disabling one peripheral module results in a reduction of 5
to 10 % of the total power consumption in active mode and 10 to 20 %
of the total power consumption in Idle mode.

Clock-gating Techniques. Atmel has also implemented dynamically
configurable clock gating techniques that freeze the clock in parts
of the circuit when they are not required. Upon reactivation, the
module restarts in the same state as before. Clock-gating can also be
used to reduce noise and improve the ADC performance in situations
that require higher resolution measurements.

Flash Sampling at Low Clock Frequencies. Conventional MCUs leave
the Flash on during active mode, causing unnecessary static power
consumption at low operating frequencies of a few MHz or less. AVR
microcontrollers use a technique called Flash sampling that enables
the Flash for a few nanoseconds to sample the array's contents and
then immediately disables it, substantially reducing this source of
current leakage.

The ATmega165P and the ATmega169P are available now in production
quantities in 64-pin TQFP and 64-pin QFN packages. ATmega165P is
priced at US$2.15 and ATmega169P with LCD controller is priced at
US$2.25 for 10,000 units.

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 the registered trademarks,
picoPower(TM) and others are trademarks of Atmel Corporation or its
subsidiaries. Other terms and product names may be trademarks of
others.

Information:

Atmel's picoPower AVR information may be retrieved at:
http://www.atmel.com/products/avr/picopower .

Press Contacts:
Philippe Faure, Marketing Communications Manager -- Microcontrollers
Phone: +33-2-40-18-18-87, Email: philippe.faure@nto.atmel.com
Helen Perlegos, Public Relations -- USA and Asia Pacific Rim,
Phone: +1-408-487-2963, Email: hperlegos@atmel.com
Veronique Sablereau, Corporate Communications Manager -- Europe
Phone: +33-1-30-60-70-68, Fax: + 49-71-31-67-24-23
Email: veronique.sablereau@atmel.com

Web site: http://www.atmel.com

ots Originaltext: Atmel Corporation
Im Internet recherchierbar: http://www.presseportal.de

Contact:
Philippe Faure, Marketing Communications Manager - Microcontrollers,
+33-2-40-18-18-87, or philippe.faure@nto.atmel.com, or USA and Asia
Pacific Rim, Helen Perlegos, Public Relations, +1-408-487-2963, or
hperlegos@atmel.com, or Europe, Veronique Sablereau, Corporate
Communications Manager, +33-1-30-60-70-68, or fax, +
49-71-31-67-24-23, or veronique.sablereau@atmel.com, all of Atmel