Up close and personal with Atmel’s SAM4L Xplained Pro

As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel’s SAM4L is quite the versatile microcontroller (MCU), as it can be used to power a wide range of devices including glucose meters, game controllers, thermostats and remote process control nodes.

“Essentially, Atmel’s SAM4L lineup of MCUs redefine the power benchmark for Cortex-M4 processor-based devices, delivering the lowest power in active mode (down to 90µA/MHz) as well as sleep mode with full RAM retention (1.5µA) with the shortest wake-up time (down to 1.5µs),” an Atmel engineering rep told Bits & Pieces.

“Embedding Atmel picoPower technology, the SAM4L family provides highly efficient signal processing, ease of use and high-speed communication peripherals – all ideal for power-sensitive designs in the industrial, healthcare and consumer application areas.”

To accelerate development with the SAM4L, Atmel offers the SAM4L Xplained Pro, a hardware-based platform that allows engineers to more easily evaluate the ARM-powered SAM4LC4 MCU. Supported by the Atmel Studio integrated development platform, the kit provides easy access to various SAM4L features and explains how to integrate the device in a customer design. Like other Atmel Xplained Pro evaluation kits, the SAM4L Xplained Pro is capable of significantly expanding its original functionality by linking to additional Xplained Pro extension kits.

For a complete and ready to go package, engineers can also check out the ATSAM4L-XSTK starter kit, which is packaged with Atmel’s I/O1 Xplained Pro, OLED1 Xplained Pro, PROTO1 Xplained Pro and SLCD1 Xplained Pro extension boards.

Key SAM4L Xplained Pro specs include:

• SAM4LC4 microcontroller
• One mechanical reset button
• One mechanical user pushbutton (wake-up, bootloader entry or general purpose)
• One QTouch button
• One yellow user LED
• USB interface, host and device function (shared physical interface)
• 32.768kHz crystal
• 12MHz crystal
• 4 Xplained Pro extension headers
• One custom extension header for segment LCD displays
• LDO/Buck regulator mode selection
• LCD cluster power configuration option
• Embedded Debugger
• Auto-ID for board identification in Atmel Studio 6.1
• One yellow status LED
• One green board power LED
• Symbolic debug of complex data types including scope information
• Programming
• Data Gateway Interface: USART, TWI, 4 GPIOs
• Virtual COM port (CDC)
• USB powered
• Supported with application examples in Atmel Software Framework

The SAM4L Xplained Pro can be purchased here from Atmel’s store.