32-bit microcontrollers are based on robust security

This latest family of Microchip MCUs targets a broad spectrum of potential applications including the IoT and security-in-home automation or smart agriculture, and ultra-low-power applications such as energy harvesting and other low-power industrial use.

The devices are also suitable for capacitive touch control applications such as remote controls, automotive door handles or industrial keypads.

The low-power SAM L10 and SAM L11 family comprises the industry’s first Arm Cortex-M23-based MCUs in a small footprint, delivering enhanced performance and smaller code size compared to Arm Cortex M0+-based devices.

The family has achieved an EEMBC ULPMark certified benchmark score of 405, which is more than 200% higher than the nearest competitor devices.

The SAM L11 MCUs also provide robust security features including: Arm TrustZone; chip-level tamper detect; crypto-acceleration with AES128 and SHA256 encryption; secure boot and bootloader; and secure key storage.

Ideal for protecting network nodes from remote software attacks, the TrustZone technology can partition the main processor into secured and non-secure zones for a variety of IoT applications such as LoRA or SigFox low-power wireless nodes, or in access control, or in automated systems with connected thermostats, for example.

The SAM L10 and SAM L11 family also integrates industry-leading capacitive-touch technology and Microchip’s proprietary picoPower technology, which delivers both high performance and low-power consumption, thereby improving battery life and lowering overall system cost.

Other key metrics of the MCUs include: an ultra-low active current of less than 25µA per MHz; standby RAM retention of less than 0.6µA; OFF-mode consumption of less than 100nA; and wakeup times of 1.5µs from idle mode and 2.6µs from sleep mode.

Both the SAM L10 and SAM L11 are configured with a 32MHz Cortex-M23 microprocessor core with up to 64K Flash memory and up to 16K SRAM.

Key peripherals for both devices also include: enhanced PTC; 12-bit ADC; 10-bit DAC; op amps; and Sercom serial interfaces. Package options include TQFP, QFN, WLCSP and SSOP, and temperature options include –40 to +85°C and –40 to +125°C.

To enable engineers to get up and running quickly and evaluate the possibilities of the MCUs, RS is also stocking Microchip’s Xplained Pro development kits, based respectively around the SAM L10 and SAM L11.

The Microchip SAM L10 and SAM L11 MCUs and Xplained Pro kits are shipping now from RS in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions.