Three new AVR microcontrollers are now available that incorporate 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.

The 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 memory, EEPROM, and SRAM. The ATmega164P has 16 KB of self- programmable flash program memory, whereas the ATmega324P and ATmega644P have 32 and 64 KB, respectively. All three devices feature a 10-bit ADC, two USARTs, SPI, a two-wire interface, and they operate from 1.8 to 5.5 V with up to 20-MIPS throughput.

AVR picoPower microcontrollers consume as little as 340 µA in Active mode, 650 nA in Power Save mode with a real-time counter, and 100 nA in Power Down mode. They will be pin-, performance-, and code-compatible with existing AVR microcontrollers.

The ATmega164P and ATmega324P in 40-pin PDIP, 44-pin TQFP, and 44-pin QFN packages are available now for sampling. Production quantities will be available in the fourth quarter of 2006. Volume prices for 10,000 pieces and up are $2.23 for the ATmega164P and $2.78 for the ATtiny324P, respectively. The ATmega644P will be available for sampling in early 2007 and production quantities in the second quarter of 2007. Volume prices for 10,000 pieces and up will be $3.72.

Atmel Corp.
www.atmel.com