Date: 19/10/2006

Atmel develops a chip to detect and transmit the tyre pressures in automotives

Atmel has integrated RF transmitter and 8 bit flash Microcontroller into a single chip. It senses the automotive tyre pressure through simple and low cost capacitor sensor interface.

The ATA6285 and ATA6286 microcontroller-transmitter ICs integrate sensor interface, Atmel's ATA5756 and ATA5757 RF transmitters and ATmega AVR 8-bit Flash Microcontroller. The new ICs are designed to control and transmit data gained from capacitive pressure and motion sensors. Some notable functions are, integrated temperature sensor with shut-down mode, 90-kHz slow-oscillation mode for timer wake-up in sleep mode, and LF input with several header options.

The chip also provides interesting power management features such as sleep mode controlled/limited current in various other modes of operations.

The ATA6285 operates at 315 MHz and ATA6286 operates at 433 MHz. The data is transmitted either by Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK) or Frequency Shift Keying(FSK) at a data rate of 10Kbaud in Manchester mode.

Atmel says this is industry's first such product.

The operated voltage varies from 2V to 3.6V and the operation temperature is from -40 degrees C to +125 degrees C.

Package: QFN32.

Availability: Sampling now, production volumes in mid 2007

Price: $2.60 each.( 50 piece order quantity).