ARM7-Based MCU With FPGA Interface to Multi-Layer AHB

San Jose, California (ots/PRNewswire) -

- Offers seamless migration to CAP7 customizable MCUs for
ARM7-plus-FPGA designs

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) today announced the
AT91CAP7E, the industry's first ARM7(TM)-based MCU with a direct FPGA
interface. The AT91CAP7E is a standard microcontroller with an FPGA
interface that makes the FPGA look and work like it is on the
internal bus of the MCU. It provides customers with a two-chip,
no-NRE, FPGA-plus ARM7 solution and offers an engineering-free
migration path to a lower cost, and a lower power customizable MCU.

The CAP7E includes a six-layer advanced high-speed bus (AHB),
peripheral DMA controller and 160 Kbytes of on-chip SRAM. On chip
peripherals include USB 2.0 full speed device, SPI master and slave,
two USARTs, three 16-bit timer counters, an 8-channel/ 10-bit analog
to digital converter, plus a full-functioned system controller
including interrupt and power control and supervisory functions. The
FPGA interface on the CAP7E provides the FPGA with direct access to
the CAP7E's on-chip AHB and peripheral DMA controller. This
architecture eliminates FPGA-induced bus contention, off-loads
MCU-to-FPGA communications from the CPU, and frees up the external
bus interface for external memory access.

Interfacing an ARM7-based MCU to an FPGA has traditionally been
done through the external bus interface (EBI) or programmable I/O.
Either arrangement requires that the CPU transfer data to and from
the FPGA one word-at-a-time, basically stealing CPU cycles that
should be conserved for processing and limiting access to external
memory during FPGA operations.

The FPGA interface on Atmel's CAP7E provides the FPGA with two
AHB masters, four AHB slaves, a special direct AHB slave interface to
an external RAM through the FPGA, and a programmable ROM that remaps
the external RAM to emulate and debug the ROM code. Fourteen advanced
peripheral bus (APB) slaves, two full-duplex DMA channels and 32-bit
programmable I/O may be hardware selected to share I/O. An on-chip
priority interrupt controller provides up to 13 encoded interrupts
and two additional un-encoded interrupts for DMA transfers.

Third-party Tools and IP. The same C-compilers, RTOS, ICEs and
IDEs used with Atmel's AT91SAM ARM(R)-based MCUs can be used with
CAP(TM). Atmel has an extensive portfolio of silicon-proven
peripherals that are available free of charge to customers migrating
to a customizable MCU.

Availability and Pricing. Atmel's AT91CAP7E is available now and
is priced at US$9.50 in quantities of 10,000 units in a 225 BGA
package.

About CAP7 Customizable MCUs

Atmel's CAP7 customizable MCU is an ARM7-based microcontroller
with a metal-programmable (MP) block with 450K gates or the
equivalent of 56K FPGA logic cells (LC). Any functionality that has
been implemented in an FPGA may be migrated directly to a CAP7 device
with no special EDA tools or customer-side engineering. Standard FPGA
software tools are all that is necessary to implement functions such
as LCD controllers, DSP algorithms (e.g. GPS correlators, FFTs, FIR
filters), and proprietary customer IP. A CAP7 implementation delivers
as much as 8X better performance, consumes 98% less static power, and
costs about 30% less than the FPGA-plus-MCU implementation.

About Atmel

Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of
microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory
and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's
broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is
able to provide the electronics industry with complete system
solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications,
computing and automotive markets.

(C) 2008 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), logo
and combinations thereof, and others, are registered trademarks,
CAP(TM) and others are trademarks of Atmel Corporation or its
subsidiaries. ARM(R), and others are registered trademarks or
trademarks of ARM Ltd. Other terms and product names may be
trademarks of others.

Information:

Atmel's AT91CAP product information may be found at:
http://www.atmel.com/products/AT91CAP

Press Contacts:
Barbara Bailey, Marketing Communications Manager - USA
Tel: +1-719-540-1895, Email: barbara.bailey@atmel.com
Helen Perlegos, Public Relations, Tel: +1-408-487-2963,
Email: hperlegos@atmel.com

Web site: http://www.atmel.com

ots Originaltext: Atmel Corporation
Im Internet recherchierbar: http://www.presseportal.de

Contact:
Barbara Bailey, Marketing Communications Manager - USA,
+1-719-540-1895, barbara.bailey@atmel.com, or Helen Perlegos, Public
Relations, +1-408-487-2963, hperlegos@atmel.com, both of Atmel
Corporation