SAN JOSE, California, March 3 /PRNewswire/ --

- New ICs Increase Battery Life While Decreasing Application
Foot Print and Reducing Design Complexity

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) announced today a new family of 
tinyAVR(R) microcontrollers. These AVR(R) devices are targeted at 
applications that run from a single battery, such as AA, AAA, or coin cell.
The first member of this family is the ATtiny43U. It is a perfect fit for
portable battery powered consumer applications like phone accessories, remote
controls, sporting goods and personal care products. ATtiny43U has 4-Kbytes
of Flash memory and 64 bytes of In-System programmable EEPROM.

A regular AA or AAA battery has a voltage of up to 1.8V fully charged.
When energy is drawn from the battery, the battery voltage drops as the
battery discharges, down to 0.7V where there is hardly any energy at all left
in the battery. The ATtiny43U has an on-chip boost regulator that works from
battery voltages between 0.7 and 1.8V. The regulator converts the low battery
voltage up to 3V, this is sufficiently high to effectively operate the AVR
MCU, its peripherals and I/Os. The boost regulator can deliver enough current
to the I/O pins to directly drive LEDs and electric motors. The ATtiny43U
also features a 10-bit ADC, two 8-bit timer counters with PWM outputs, SPI,
I2C interface, internal temperature sensor, and has up to 8 MIPS throughput
running from a 0.7V battery.

"With the introduction of the Ultra Low Voltage tinyAVR microcontrollers
we are expanding the popular AVR product family into a new market segment.
The ATtiny43U features an internal regulator that removes the need for
multiple batteries or complex external boost regulators, this reduces the
physical size, time to market, and bill of material for battery powered
applications," said Jukka Eskelinen Director, tinyAVR Product Marketing.

Like all the other AVR microcontrollers, the ATtiny43U features an
on-chip debug system for easy, fast, and robust development. All tinyAVR
microcontrollers use the standard AVR microcontroller development tools. The
AVR Studio(R) AVR integrated development environment is available free of
charge on Atmel's website.

Availability and Pricing

Samples for the ATtiny43U are available now in a QFN20 package. Volume
prices for 10k units are USD $1.00.

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) 2009 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), Atmel logo and
combinations thereof, and AVR(R), and others are registered trademarks,
picoPower(TM), XMEGA(TM) and others are trademarks of Atmel Corporation or
its subsidiaries. Other terms and product names may be trademarks of others.

Information:

Detailed information on the ATtiny43U is available at:
http://www.atmel.com/low-voltage.

Video podcast can be seen at: http://www.avrtv.com.

Atmel's AVR product information is available at:
http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR

Atmel Press Contact:
    Helen Perlegos, Public Relations
    Tel: +1-408-487-2963, Email: helen.perlegos@atmel.com