Atmel Corporation today announced the launch of the AT91CAP9A-STK Starter Kit for its CAPÔ Customisable Microcontroller product family.

The CAP Starter Kit is the ideal vehicle for low-cost, no-risk evaluation of the customization capabilities of the CAP MCU by mapping application-specific IP blocks into its FPGA that emulates the functionality of the CAP’s embedded Metal Programmable (MP) Block.

Built on a single PCB including a AT91CAP9S ARM926EJ-SÒ-based microcontroller, 64M Bytes of SDRAM application memory, 512M Bytes of NAND Flash and an optional DataFlash with up to 8M Bytes, together with external interfaces for Ethernet, USB Host and Device, ¼ VGA LCD Panel with Touch Screen, SD Card, 4 analog inputs and audio headphones, the CAP Starter Kit features an Altera Stratix2 EP2S15F484 FPGA and its associated EPCS16 serial configuration memory.

The FPGA provides 15600 four-input Lookup Table (LUT) equivalents, corresponding to approximately 124800 gates in the CAP MP Block. For application-specific external interfaces, the AT91CAP9S has 64 general-purpose I/O connections, and the FPGA has 2 banks of 64 I/Os.

Debug is facilitated by the provision of an ICE-JTAG interface for CAP9 JTAG programming, and a USB-Blaster-JTAG interface for Stratix2 JTAG programming. The CAP Starter Kit also includes Atmel’s AT73C224 and AT73C239 ICs for power supply and battery management.

Michel Le Lan, Atmel’s Marketing Director for Application-Specific Products, commented,  “The CAP Starter Kit significantly enlarges the CAP user community. It lowers even further the cost barrier for developing a customized microcontroller. It can be used by anyone from a developer in a tier 1 electronics company to the smallest startup to find out how easy it is to customize an ARM-based system-on-chip for a specific application.

"It is also the ideal vehicle for students of electronics engineering to consolidate their knowledge of system-on-chip hardware and software design.”

Availability and Pricing

The AT91CAP9A-STK Starter Kit is now available. The AT91CAP9A-STK Starter Kit is priced at $750.