Atmel Extends Battery Life with its New picoPower AVR MCUs

Atmel Extends Battery Life with its New picoPower AVR MCUs

Atmel® Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML), announced today the first two AVR® microcontrollers to incorporate a power-saving technology that provides multi-year battery-life in lighting control, security, keyless entry, ZigBee™ and other applications that spend most of their time in sleep mode. The picoPower™ 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.

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

The two picoPower devices now available are the ATmega169P with a 4×25 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. 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.”