 | Not to be left out of recent news, Atmel announced a different approach to a low power MCU today, announcing the SAM3S series. I had a couple minutes with Frederic Galliard, ARM product marketing manager for Atmel, to discuss the highlights.One interesting point with this device is trying to span the needs of users with flexibility, addressing both users needing low power consumption and users needing more performance by scaling clock speed and supply voltage. This lets a design team pick a part that can be used in multiple applications.To get to a power point of 2.3mW at 1 MHz, several things were done: lowering supply voltage to 1.62V, optimized flash sense amplifiers and a x64 mode instead of x128, and a self-adapting onchip regulator which scales current consumption.But with the same part, users can go up to 64 MHz at 1.45 mw/MHz. At the performance end, onboard termination resistors can simplify most typical PCB layouts and save some costs.The SAM3S family also provides a pin-compatible upgrade from the SAM7S series, adding not only ARM Cortex-M3 core performance but also an enhanced parallel data capture on PIOs with DMA, and enhanced security features to protect software.Topics covered in this article
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