Atmel Expands Its Ultra-Low Power Microntroller Offering

Atmel(R) Corporation announced today three new AVR(R) microcontrollers with incorporated power-saving technology that provides multi-year battery life in lighting control, security, keyless entry, ZigBee(TM) and other applications that spend a significant amount 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 RTC sleep power consumption.

The three picoPower devices now available are the ATmega164P, ATmega324P and ATmega644P 44-pin general purpose microcontrollers. All three microcontrollers are pin and feature compatible, differing only in the size of Flash, EEPROM and SRAM memory. ATmega164P has 16 KB of self-programmable Flash program memory, whereas the ATmega324P and ATmega644P have 32 KB and 64 KB, respectively. All three devices feature a 10-bit ADC, two USARTs, SPI, Two-Wire-Interface and operate from 1.8 to 5.5 volts with up to 20 MIPS throughput.

AVR picoPower microcontrollers consume as little as 340 uA in active mode, 650 nA in power-save mode with real time counter (RTC), and 100 nA in power- down mode. They will be pin-, performance- and code-compatible with existing AVR microcontrollers.

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