Atmel Introduces First 32-bit AVR Microcontroller Featuring Floating Point Unit

The IEEE 754-1985-compatible FPU increases the performance, precision and dynamic range of calculations offered by the Atmel AVR UC3 CPU. The native support for the floating point arithmetic allows design engineers to use a full-featured toolbox for designing sensor and control applications. In addition, the advanced math can be applied to enhance signal processing, filtering, and noise suppression in a wide range of applications including motor control, robotics and audio.

The Atmel AVR UC3 C series delivers more processing power--in a smaller footprint--than any other microcontroller in our line card, said Haakon Skar, marketing director of AVR UC3 products, Atmel Corporation. The new series offers better performance and enables us to include this new FPU without negatively impacting the microcontroller power consumption. These new 32-bit AVR microcontrollers complement our already-strong line card of 8-bit AVR MCUs targeting the industrial control.

The Atmel UC3 C series is the first Atmel 32-bit AVR microcontroller built for high-speed communication designed for 3.0 - 5.5V operation with a true 5V operation. A 5V supply voltage is a requirement for many industrial control applications to allow better signal-to-noise ratio, particularly in applications that require large switching currents or very sensitive analog instrumentation. The UC3 C series comes with a 9-layer databus, 64 + 4KB high-speed SRAM and a mix of high-speed communication peripherals including a 100Mbps Ethernet, Dual CAN ports and a full-speed USB interface. An SDRAM interface is included in larger devices. The layered databus and split SRAM architecture allows the system designer to easily avoid clashes on high-speed communications that could result in package loss or decreased system performance.

The UC3 C series also offers the Atmel Peripheral Event System which is found in the Atmel UC3 L series and Atmel 8-bit AVR® XMEGA® products. The Event System allows inter-peripheral communication to take place without CPU intervention and guarantees two-cycle latency between the completion of one peripheral operation and the start of another. This ultimately eliminates the jitter and unpredictable latency associated with a traditional CPU interrupt.

Finally, the UC3 C series includes FlashVault code protection, a flash security technology that allows the on-chip flash to be partially programmed and locked, creating secure on-chip storage for secret code and software intellectual property. Code stored in the FlashVault will execute as normal, but cannot be read, copied or debugged. This allows a device with FlashVault code protection to carry valuable software, such as a math library or an encryption algorithm, from a trusted location to a potentially untrustworthy partner where the rest of the source code can be developed, debugged and programmed.

The new UC3C series is available in a range of package options including 9x9mm QFN64 to 22x22mm TQFP144 packages. Power consumption is in line with the existing Atmel AVR microcontroller UC3 A and B series.