Atmel Announces ARM Cortex-A5-based MPUs Optimized for 720p Video Playback and Advanced Security Functions

Atmel’s SAMA5D4 series expand on the SAMA5 family by offering H264, VP8 and MPEG4 720p video playback capability at 30fps for an enhanced user interface experience, bringing significant increases in processing and system performance. Additionally, the series also provides higher security leveraging ARM^® TrustZone^® technology to protect the system against counterfeiting, remote firmware updates and allow safe storage of critical data.

“With the large market acceptance of the Atmel SAMA5D3 Cortex^®-A5-based MPUs, we are continuing to shape experiences surrounding the user interface for industrial and consumer applications. The SAMA5D4 enables the addition of video playback to control panels and displays at an unrivalled cost point,” said Jacko Wilbrink, sr. director of MPUs at Atmel. “Security and counterfeiting are becoming growing concerns within the rapidly growing IoT market. These applications require MPUs with advanced encryption while maintaining the same level of high performance. Atmel® | SMART™ SAMA5D4 is positioned to deliver the security and performance many Internet-connected systems require.”

Featuring an ARM NEON™ engine for accelerated signal processing for multimedia and graphics, the SAMA5D4 runs up to 528MHz and includes a 720p hardware video decoder, along with 128kB L2 cache for improved system performance. The MPU integrates powerful peripherals for connectivity and user interface applications including a TFT LCD display controller and dual EMAC.

The SAMA5D4 series offer advanced security functions to protect customer systems against counterfeiting by running authentic software and secure data. These include on-the-fly execution of encrypted code stored in external memory, tamper detection with erasure of critical data, and hardware encryption engines supporting private and public keys algorithms.

Ecosystem

To support the new series of SAMA5D4 MPUs, Atmel® has developed a free Linux® distribution available on linux4sam.com and published on a mainline kernel.

Atmel offers a free graphics software development kit (SDK) based on Qt5 including demos, widgets, background images, icons, and useful graphical elements to ease a designer’s interface development and customization. For non-operating system (OS) users, Atmel delivers more than 40 peripheral drivers in C. Atmel collaborates with an expanded global network of partners, including IAR, Timesys, Free Electrons, Active Semi, Micron, ISSI, Segger, FreeRTOS, Express Logic, eForce and NuttX that deliver development tools, PMIC, memories, Systems-On-Module (SOM) and software solutions.

To evaluate and prototype your application, Atmel provides a kit covering all SAMA5D4 devices, including a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen. A Linux distribution and a graphic user interface demo with video playback based on Qt5 are made available for initial demonstration.

Availability

Samples for the SAMA5D4 are available now while production is ramping. Evaluation kits are available today using order code ATSAMA5D4-EK for $695 USD each.

The SAMA5D4 series is comprised of four devices and is shipping in BGA289 and BGA361 packages. Pricing for the SAMA5D43 with the 720p hardware video decoding option starts at $8.95 USD for 1,000-piece quantities.