May 7, 2001 – San Jose, CA – Atmel(R) Corp. has unveiled a new programmable system-on-a-chip designed specifically for low-power, high performance portable applications.

The company’s AT94K10 Field Programmable System Level IC (FPSLIC) provides system-level integration of Microcontroller, programmable logic, control, memory and I/O functions, while consuming less than 50uA in standby and only 2-3 mA/MHz during operation, Atmel said.

The AT94K’s high level of integration and low power drain makes it ideal for such low power applications as personal digital assistants and their peripherals, cell phone add-on equipment, global positioning systems, portable test equipment, point-of-sale equipment, security systems or wireless Internet appliances.

The newest FPSLIC device integrates a 20+ MIPS AVR RISC microcontroller with hardware multiplier, 10,000 gates of SRAM-based programmable logic, 36 KBytes of SRAM, an industry standard two-wire serial interface, two UARTs, three timer/counters, and a watchdog timer.

The on-chip MCU has 127 16-bit, fixed-length instructions that have been optimized so that 90% of all MCU operations can be handled by a single instruction. A two-stage pipeline and separate addresses for load and store operations enable single-cycle instruction execution. Thirty-two 8-bit registers allow the CPU to access multiple data simultaneously, eliminating the need for most data transfer operations and enabling higher code density. The AVR’s higher code density results in code size that is as much as 50% smaller than it would be with other 8-bit MCUs for the same functionality.