The industry’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M based MCUs

The devices combine low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks, three features that are cornerstones of most IoT applications. Sampling now, the MCUs come complete with a development platform featuring an Xplained PRO kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.

The SAM L21 MCUs consume just one-third the power of competing solutions on the market today and integrate the company’s proprietary low power picoPower technology. While running the EEMBC ULPBench, the industry marker for low power, the MCUs achieve a score of 185, the highest publicly-recorded score for any Cortex-M based processor or MCU in the world, significantly higher than the 167 and 123 scores announced by other vendors. The devices consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.

The SAM L21 MCUs are suitable for IoT, consumer, industrial, medical applications. To reduce leakage in sleep modes, the devices feature SRAM back biasing. Sleep modes do not only gate away the clock signal to stop switching consumption, but also remove power from sub domains to fully eliminate leakage. The MCUs also support Sleepwalking, a technology that enables peripherals to request a clock when needing to wake-up from sleep modes and perform tasks without having to power up the CPU Flash and other support systems. To solve complex tasks using minimal gates and and the lowest possible power, the SAM L21 MCUs feature Atmel’s proprietary Event System, which allows peripherals to work together. The devices are also offered with a low power capacitive touch sensing peripheral that supports wake-up on touch and can run in all operating modes.

“With over two decades of MCU experience, picoPower technology is part of Atmel’s heritage, starting with our AVR family. The SAM L21 MCUs leverage this low power expertise and are enabling customers to solve their power challenges for battery-powered IoT devices,” said Pat Sullivan, Vice President of Marketing, Microcontroller Business Unit, Atmel.

“In Atmel's announcement last year for the company's SAM L21 family, I had pointed out the low current consumption ratings for both the active and sleep mode operation of this product family, now I can confirm this opinion with concrete data derived from the EEMBC ULPBench,” said Markus Levy, President and Founder, EEMBC. “Atmel achieved the lowest power of any Cortex-M based processor and MCU in the world because of its patented ultra-low power picoPower technology. These ULPBench results are remarkable, demonstrating the company's low-power expertise utilising DC/DC conversion for voltage monitoring, as well as other innovative techniques.”