Atmel Expands 6-pin picoPower AVR Microcontroller Family

19th August 2009

ES Admin

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Atmel has announced today three new 6-pin picoPower AVR microcontrollers. The ATtiny4, ATtiny5, and ATtiny9 are targeted towards size and cost constrained high volume consumer applications requiring processing power and low current consumption. These new devices are all pin and code compatible, offering a rich feature set including 512bytes or 1K byte of programmable Flash memory, 32 bytes of internal SRAM, 4-channel 8-bit A/D converter (in ATtiny5), analog comparator, and a 16-bit timer with PWM.

Using the AVR CPU these 6-pin tinyAVR microcontrollers can process up to 12 MIPS at 12 MHz, up to six times the performance of any other similar sized microcontroller in the market. This processing efficiency significantly reduces the time in active mode and increases the time spent in power saving sleep modes reducing the total power current consumption. Also, to run the same application tinyAVR needs only half of the code memory size compared to other microcontroller architectures.

ATtiny4, ATtiny5, and ATtiny9 are pin and code compatible to the existing ATtiny10. For customers this means effortless migration in between projects with different requirements. The 6-pin tinyAVR microcontrollers are also pin compatible with similar devices from competitors. This enables customer to increase the performance and to reduce the power consumption in their existing designs.

“When the ATtiny10 was launched in April 2009, we were inundated by requests from engineers and excited to witness the rapid market acceptance resulting in strong demand for the smallest of the AVR microcontrollers. It is clear that developers needed innovation in this market segment. Atmel is now expanding the offering with three new parts with different memory densities and feature sets. With more parts available, engineers can cost optimize their applications without sacrificing the features they need”, said Jukka Eskelinen, Director, tinyAVR Product Marketing.

All tinyAVR microcontrollers use the standard AVR microcontroller development tools. The AVR Studio integrated development environment is available free of charge on Atmel’s website.