Atmel is the latest microcontroller supplier to take a licence for ARM’s Cortex-M3 32-bit Risc processor.
 
Atmel already has licences for ARM7TDMI, ARM926EJ-S and ARM1176JZ S processors and now it has taken the Cortex-M3 licence to use in a new family of AT91SAM3 Flash MCUs.

The move is part of the growing importance of the 32-bit microcontroller market for which the Cortex-M3 processor is emerging as a leading architecture. Atmel will market the chips alongside its existing 32-bit MCUs.

“It complements our current product offering of AT91SAM and AVR32 microcontrollers,” said Alfredo Vadillo, Atmel’s managing director for ARM microcontrollers.

According to Eric Schorn, v-p marketing at ARM, the move by Atmel “reinforces our architecture as the reference for 32-bit microcontrollers.”

Cortex-M3 fits well with the current trend for energy-efficient embedded system design. In April, ARM added a new Wake-Up Interrupt controller to the Cortex-M3 which allows what the company called an "almost instantaneous return to fully active mode from an ultra-low leakage retention state".

The Cortex-M3 processor is also supported by the ARM Power Management Kit (PMK) and is integrated with low power physical IP standard cell libraries and memories from the ARM Artisan physical IP family.

Another recent Cortex-M3 licensee Oslo-based Energy Micro plans to introduce its first "ultra low-power" microcontroller family, dubbed EnergetIC, in the second quarter of 2009.

Other licensees include Luminary Micro, STMicroelectronics, NXP, TI and Toshiba.

For Atmel the Cortex-M3 processor is important because of its multi-layer internal buses, an enhancement to the DMA for system peripherals and distributed peripheral data controllers that give the AT91SAM family its high internal data bandwidth, and enable intensive data processing and high-speed data transfers to take place concurrently.
 
Atmel’s AT91SAM3 flash microcontroller family based on the ARM Cortex-M3 processor will be available in 4Q 2008.

For AT91SAM product information