Fig 1.
San Jose, Calif., USA: Responding to customer demands for more memory, Atmel expanded its SAM9 ARM926-based family of microcontrollers with five new devices that replace SDRAM with DDR. Also, thanks to the company’s partnership with Conexant, the SAM9G15, SAM9G25, SAM9G35, SAM9X25, and SAM9X35 contain a soft modem, eliminating the need for an external modem.
Three of the five devices also offer a new graphics LCD with hardware acceleration and resistive touch screen support. All will find homes in applications such as industrial and building control, HVAC, PoS terminals, printers and medical devices, and smart grid with data concentrators, as well as in the HMI and M2M markets.
“There was a strong message from our customers—everybody wants an iPhone-type UI, even in our industrial customer base,” says Frederic Gaillard, product marketing manager for Atmel. He went on to explain that the new LCD enhancement allows four overlays with alpha blending, image scaling, rotating, and colour space conversion.
“To resize a video being watched, with the old generation the processor had to recompute the whole picture. Thanks to the new overlays, you only have to recompute the overlay with the video window in it,” he adds, saying that this allows the creation of richer user interfaces while offloading the CPU.
Other new features include i NAND flash support with 24-bit ECC, and more communication channels including dual 10/100 Ethernet, dual CAN, and up to 3x USB ports.
Atmel
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