Atmel’s latest customisable ARM7 microcontroller is intended for rapid (12 week) turnaround designs.
NRE charges are $75,000, and unit costs as low as $5, without requiring a separate license from ARM, said Atmel.
The AT91CAP7L microcontroller has 200k gates of metal programmable cell fabric that can be used to implement proprietary customer IP, hardware accelerators, additional processor cores or other peripherals in a classic SoC configuration.
“Fabless semiconductor companies are often stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to implementing new designs,” said Jay Johnson, Atmel’s director of CAP marketing.
“Low-volume, quick-turnaround Asics typically have unit costs of hundreds of dollars and often require the purchase of an ARM IP licence,” said Johnson.
Atmel said the cost saving with the second-generation metal programmable cell fabric technology (MPCF-II) comes form using only three metal and three via layers for configuration.
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The programmable device also has power advantages over FPGAs. “Worst-case static power consumption for the CAP7L is between 3mW and 4mW – 98% less than the power consumed by a typical FPGA,” said Johnson.
The HDL code for any custom-IP is developed using standard, vendor-specific or third-party FPGA design tools. Once verified, the customer provides the register transfer level (RTL) netlist to Atmel for implementation in the MP block on the CAP7L.
Prototypes can be available within 10 weeks of final gate level netlist and production quantities within 12 weeks, said Johnson.
The same C-compilers, RTOS, OSs, ICEs and IDEs used with Atmel’s ARM processor-based MCUs can be used with the CAP versions of the devices. These include Atmel’s free GNU gcc C compiler, GNU gdb debugger, FreeRTOS.org real-time kernel.
Commercially available tools include ARM (RealView Development Suite, RealView ICE, RealView Trace2) Green Hills (Multi IDE, TimeMachine, Integrity OS), IAR (C compiler – Embedded Workbench), ExpressLogic (Real-time Operating System – ThreadX) and Micrium (Real-time Operating System – uCOS/II).
A starter kit is available for engineering evaluation. The AT91CAP7A-STK kit is priced at $399.