Date: 15/11/2010

Atmel expands ARM Cortex-M3 Flash MCU family with SAM3N series

Atmel Corporation has introduced the Atmel SAM3N series to expand their ARM Cortex-M3 Flash family. The SAM3N series is a general-purpose microcontroller targeted at applications including consumer, industrial control, metering, toys, medical, test and measurement, 802.15.4 wireless networking, and PC, cell phone and gaming peripherals.

Atmel says its SAM3N and SAM3S series are the first ARM-based microcontrollers that offer capacitive touch support for buttons, sliders and wheels with the Atmel QTouch library and studio to deploy modern-user interfaces. The new series offers an extended supply range from 1.62 to 3.6V to enable a true 1.8V operation and 0.86mW per megahertz in active mode. The lower power consumption can also be reduced to 1.9uA in 1.8V standby mode with RTC (real-time clock) running.

The Atmel SAM3N Cortex-M3 Flash series is pin-to-pin compatible with the best-selling Atmel ARM7TDMI-based SAM7S series to offer an ideal migration path to higher performance and lower power consumption.

"The SAM3N series offers the ideal general-purpose microcontroller with the best cost-to-power consumption, processing power and peripheral set ratio," said Jacko Wilbrink, director of ARM microcontrollers, Atmel Corporation. "The SAM3S offers additional features with higher performance and more peripherals options including 12-bit ADC, SDIO, USB full-speed device, external bus interface, and more Flash SRAM options."

Packages: 48-, 64- and 100-pin 0.5mm pitch QFP, in 100-ball 0.8mm pitch BGA, and 48- and 64-pin 0.45mm pitch QFN packages.