Atmel adds ARM Cortex-M based MCU at 35 µA/MHz power usage
With power consumption down to 35 µA/MHz in active mode and 200 nA in sleep mode, the ultra-low power SAM L family broadens the Atmel | SMART 32-bit ARM-based MCU portfolio and extends battery life, “from years to decades” for devices such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and devices placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-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 SAM L21 comes with a development platform including an Xplained PRO kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.
The family integrates the company’s proprietary ultra-low power picoPower technology. While running the EEMBC ULPBench benchmark, the SAM L21 achieves a score of 185, the highest publicly-recorded score for any Cortex-M based processor or MCU. Atmel’s SAM L21 family consumes less than 940 nA with full 40 kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar and 200 nA in the deepest sleep mode.
The ultra-low power is based on, among other factors;
– Best-available active mode current consumption.
– SRAM back-biasing to reduce leakage in sleep modes.
– Sleep modes that do not only gate away the clock signal to stop switching consumption, but also remove power from sub domains to fully eliminate leakage.
– SAM L21 peripherals that support Sleepwalking—a technology that enables peripherals to request a clock when needed, to wake-up from sleep modes and perform tasks without having to power up the CPU Flash and other support systems.
– Atmel’s proprietary Event System that allows peripherals to work together to solve complex tasks using minimal gates and also the lowest possible power.
– Ultra-low power capacitive touch sensing peripheral that can run in all operating modes and supports wake-up on touch.
“With over two decades of MCU experience, ultra-low power picoPower technology is part of Atmel’s heritage, starting with our AVR family. The SAM L21 MCUs leverage this ultra-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 Corporation.
“In Atmel’s announcement last year for the company’s SAM L21 family, I had pointed out the amazingly 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, adding, “These ULPBench results are remarkable, demonstrating the company’s low-power expertise utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring, as well as other innovative techniques.”
The SAM L21 is compatible with the Atmel Xplained Pro, a professional evaluation board featuring auto-identification in Atmel Studio with an on-board debugger and standardised extension connectors. Atmel Xplained development kit is a low-cost, easy-to-use, fast prototyping and evaluation platform for Atmel AVR and Atmel | SMART ARM-based MCUs. The kit demonstrates the features and capabilities of Atmel MCUs and MPUs and can be customised with a range of expansion boards. The SAM L21 Xplained Pro is fully supported by Atmel Studio, a free IDE that features power profiling tools for the SAM L21 board, making it easy to pinpoint power peaks and calculate average power consumption.
Atmel; www.atmel.com/products/microcontrollers/arm/default.aspx
Information on Atmel’s picoPower technology: www.atmel.com/technologies/lowpower/default.aspx
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