September 15, 2006—Atmel Corporation has introduced three AVR microcontrollers with incorporated power-saving technology that provides multi-year battery life in lighting control, security, keyless entry, ZigBee and other applications that spend a significant amount 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 RTC sleep power consumption, says Atmel.
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.
Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. For more on the company, see its Web site.
