The venerable 8-bit MCU gains newfound speed — Atmel, USA

The venerable 8-bit MCU gains newfound speed — Atmel, USA

The AVR XMEGA raises system performance of the venerable 8-bit microcontroller to new heights in some cases beating high-performance 32-bit processors. The 32-MHz MCU features an 8-channel event system and four-channel DMA controller that allows up to eight interperipheral signals and up to four 64 Mbit/s data transfers to occur while the CPU is in idle sleep mode, with no context switching or interrupts required.

The ICs event response time is as low as 31.25 ns — 80 times faster than a conventional 8-bit MCU. Maximum response time is 62.5 ns. The chip can also brag of 100 nA sleep mode with SRAM retention and I/O pins active.

The 1-MIPS/MHz CPU has 32 general-purpose registers and a AES/DES cryptographic engine. In a single clock cycle, the chip can feed two arbitrary registers to the ALU, do a requested operation, and write back the result to any register. The device has two 8-channel 12-bit A/D converters, and six USARTs (one with IrDA modulation), as well as two I2C/SMBus and two SPI interfaces, and costs $3 to $4.50 in production quantity.

Atmel, USA
San Jose , CA
Sales 408-441-0311

http://www.atmel.com