New ICs from Atmel Increase Battery Life While Saving Space

3rd March 2009

ES Admin

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Atmel has announced a new family of tinyAVR microcontrollers. These devices are targeted at applications that run from a single battery, such as AA, AAA, or coin cell. The first member of this family is the ATtiny43U. It is a perfect fit for portable battery powered consumer applications like phone accessories, remote controls, sporting goods and personal care products. ATtiny43U has 4-Kbytes of Flash memory and 64 bytes of In-System programmable EEPROM.

A regular AA or AAA battery has a voltage of up to 1.8V fully charged. When energy is drawn from the battery, the battery voltage drops as the battery discharges, down to 0.7V where there is hardly any energy at all left in the battery. The ATtiny43U has an on-chip boost regulator that works from battery voltages between 0.7 and 1.8V. The regulator converts the low battery voltage up to 3V, this is sufficiently high to effectively operate the AVR MCU, its peripherals and I/Os. The boost regulator can deliver enough current to the I/O pins to directly drive LEDs and electric motors. The ATtiny43U also features a 10-bit ADC, two 8-bit timer counters with PWM outputs, SPI, I2C interface, internal temperature sensor, and has up to 8 MIPS throughput running from a 0.7V battery.

“With the introduction of the Ultra Low Voltage tinyAVR microcontrollers we are expanding the popular AVR product family into a new market segment. The ATtiny43U features an internal regulator that removes the need for multiple batteries or complex external boost regulators, this reduces the physical size, time to market, and bill of material for battery powered applications,” said Jukka Eskelinen Director, tinyAVR Product Marketing.

Like all the other AVR microcontrollers, the ATtiny43U features an on-chip debug system for easy, fast, and robust development. All tinyAVR microcontrollers use the standard AVR microcontroller development tools. The AVR Studio® AVR integrated development environment is available free of charge on Atmel’s website.