Atmel releases 13 new devices in 3 different product series in its 32-bit AVR UC3 product portfolio. The AVR UC3 microcontrollers feature high performance, DSP instructions, USB connectivity, secure encryption and capacitive touch support. In addition to new devices in the existing UC3 L and UC3 A Series, a new UC3 D Series of MCUs is now available.
The AVR UC3L is Atmel’s 32-bit MCU series with picoPower technology consuming down to 165 µA/MHz in active mode, down to 600 nA with RTC running, and down to 9 nA in deep-sleep mode. picoPower devices offer true 1.62V operation, allowing all analog modules, oscillators and Flash to be fully functional without compromise at 1.62V. SleepWalking, a picoPower technology capability that allows peripherals to make intelligent decisions and wake the CPU directly, is available in all UC3L devices. The UC3 L Series features the built-in capacitive touch peripheral, which supports capacitive touch buttons and sliders, and a new glue logic controller. To safeguard sensitive data, FlashVault code protection enables on-chip Flash to be partially programmed and locked, for secure on-chip storage of software intellectual property. Atmel expands the memory option of the currently available UC3L0 with 128kB and 256kB of Flash. These new devices also have 32kB of internal SRAM. The new UC3L4 devices are pin-compatible with the existing UC3L0 devices. The UC3L4 adds full-speed USB device connectivity to the UC3L series. The new UC3L4 devices come in 64kB, 128KB and 256KB on-board Flash options, and offer up to 32kB of internal SRAM.
The new AVR UC3D MCU is an entry-level 32-bit series, well suited for product designs requiring low-power capacitive touch as well as other consumer and industrial applications. The series offers designers a rich feature set of devices containing a hardware QTouch capacitive touch interface, USB full-speed device, RTC with calendar, 10-bit ADC, USART, SPI, TWI, PWM and I2S . With SleepWalking technology integrated into the device, the UC3D MCU can be woken from sleep mode via a peripheral. In capacitive touch applications, the device can be put into sleep mode and woken by proximity touch. The capacitive touch module found on the UC3D supports up to 25 channels in hardware, and each channel can be configured as buttons, sliders and wheels. Multiple touch channels can be grouped together for better performance and greater flexibility in applications where different sensitivity levels are needed on different channels.
The new AVR UC3A4 is a high-performance, high-throughput 32-bit series, well suited for high-speed applications requiring security, such as PC peripherals, e-tokens, high-speed communication gateways and audio. The devices achieve performance levels of up to 1.51 DMIPS per MHz running from Flash and offers Hi-Speed USB OTG. The AVR UC3A4 features 128KBytes of onboard SRAM, where 64KBytes of the SRAM are directly coupled to the 32-bit AVR CPU for increased performance optimization, and two blocks of 32kB SRAM on the high-speed bus. These two memory blocks are physically separate, but sequential in the address map, allowing real ping-pong buffering to increase performance. The onboard Hi-Speed USB OTG takes advantage of the SRAM configuration to ensure high performance and high throughput. Additional features include memory-to-memory DMA controller, SD/SDIO card support and MLC NAND Flash with ECC interface. The device series also features a large number of communication interfaces such as USART, SPI and TWI as well as I2S and an audio bitstream D/A converter. Selected products support 128-, 192- and 256-bit AES encryption and decryption in hardware. The AES hardware encryption module is connected to the DMA controller and achieves a throughput of over 22 MB/s.
