Atmel has launched new family of AVR wireless microcontroller devices targeting wireless applications such as ZigBee and IPv6/6LoWPAN. The ATmega128RFA1 combines Atmel’s IEEE802.15.4 2.4 GHz transceiver with picoPower AVR MCU on a single chip.
The company said that the picoPower technology offers low power consumption to enable longer battery life for wireless ZigBee applications, including smart energy, building automation, telecom and health care. ATmega128RFA1 is supported by Atmel’s QTouch Library, making it easy to combine capacitive touch functionality with RF in a single chip.
The company said that the single-chip design enables designers to save board space and brings down the overall system BOM so savings can be passed onto their customers. In addition, these devices include a low-power, high performance AVR MCU with embedded flash memory.
According to the company, other features include a long-range, high performance RF transceiver to ensure a reliable wireless link and a low current consumption for extended battery life. It further claimed that MCUs in these devices run at a very low voltage operation without compromising performance.
Magnus Pedersen, product marketing director of MCU wireless solutions at Atmel, said: As the ZigBee and smart metering markets continue to grow, our customers will demand lower power devices, lower bill of material (BOM) and higher performance, all combined in an integrated single chip solution. Atmel’s ATmega128RFA1 solution addresses all these requirements for the low power, cost-sensitive ZigBee market.
“By combining our proprietary AVR technology, wireless know-how and integration expertise, we can now address all our customer needs in this market.
