SAN JOSE, California, June 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Offers seamless migration to CAP7 customizable MCUs for ARM7-plus-FPGA 
designs

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) today announced the AT91CAP7E, the
industry's first ARM7(TM)-based MCU with a direct FPGA interface. The
AT91CAP7E is a standard microcontroller with an FPGA interface that makes the
FPGA look and work like it is on the internal bus of the MCU. It provides
customers with a two-chip, no-NRE, FPGA-plus ARM7 solution and offers an
engineering-free migration path to a lower cost, and a lower power
customizable MCU.

The CAP7E includes a six-layer advanced high-speed bus (AHB), peripheral
DMA controller and 160 Kbytes of on-chip SRAM. On chip peripherals include
USB 2.0 full speed device, SPI master and slave, two USARTs, three 16-bit
timer counters, an 8-channel/ 10-bit analog to digital converter, plus a
full-functioned system controller including interrupt and power control
and supervisory functions. The FPGA interface on the CAP7E provides the FPGA
with direct access to the CAP7E's on-chip AHB and peripheral DMA controller.
This architecture eliminates FPGA-induced bus contention, off-loads
MCU-to-FPGA communications from the CPU, and frees up the external bus
interface for external memory access.

Interfacing an ARM7-based MCU to an FPGA has traditionally been done
through the external bus interface (EBI) or programmable I/O. Either
arrangement requires that the CPU transfer data to and from the FPGA one
word-at-a-time, basically stealing CPU cycles that should be conserved
for processing and limiting access to external memory during FPGA operations.

The FPGA interface on Atmel's CAP7E provides the FPGA with two AHB
masters, four AHB slaves, a special direct AHB slave interface to an external
RAM through the FPGA, and a programmable ROM that remaps the external RAM to
emulate and debug the ROM code. Fourteen advanced peripheral bus (APB)
slaves, two full-duplex DMA channels and 32-bit programmable I/O may be
hardware selected to share I/O. An on-chip priority interrupt controller
provides up to 13 encoded interrupts and two additional un-encoded interrupts
for DMA transfers.

Third-party Tools and IP. The same C-compilers, RTOS, ICEs and IDEs used
with Atmel's AT91SAM ARM(R)-based MCUs can be used with CAP(TM). Atmel has an
extensive portfolio of silicon-proven peripherals that are available free of
charge to customers migrating to a customizable MCU.

Availability and Pricing. Atmel's AT91CAP7E is available now and is
priced at US$9.50 in quantities of 10,000 units in a 225 BGA package.

About CAP7 Customizable MCUs

Atmel's CAP7 customizable MCU is an ARM7-based microcontroller with a
metal-programmable (MP) block with 450K gates or the equivalent of 56K FPGA
logic cells (LC). Any functionality that has been implemented in an FPGA may
be migrated directly to a CAP7 device with no special EDA tools or
customer-side engineering. Standard FPGA software tools are all that is
necessary to implement functions such as LCD controllers, DSP algorithms
(e.g. GPS correlators, FFTs, FIR filters), and proprietary customer IP. A
CAP7 implementation delivers as much as 8X better performance, consumes 98%
less static power, and costs about 30% less than the FPGA-plus-MCU
implementation.

About Atmel

Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of
microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio
frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's broadest
intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is able to provide
the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on consumer,
industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets.

(C) 2008 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), logo and
combinations thereof, and others, are registered trademarks, CAP(TM) and
others are trademarks of Atmel Corporation or its subsidiaries. ARM(R), and
others are registered trademarks or trademarks of ARM Ltd. Other terms and
product names may be trademarks of others.

Information:

Atmel's AT91CAP product information may be found at:
http://www.atmel.com/products/AT91CAP

Press Contacts:
    Barbara Bailey, Marketing Communications Manager - USA
    Tel: +1-719-540-1895, Email: barbara.bailey@atmel.com
    Helen Perlegos, Public Relations, Tel: +1-408-487-2963,
    Email: hperlegos@atmel.com

Web site: http://www.atmel.com