By Florence Chao, Senior Field Marketing Manager, MCU Business Development
Industrial and consumer devices using ARM® Cortex®-M4
Blood glucose meters, sport watches, game controllers and accessories, guess what they all have in common. Yes, like a lot of other industrial and consumer devices, they run on batteries and demand long or extended battery life. As an engineer, this translates into a key challenge when designing an embedded computing system. You need a central heart—in this case a microcontroller—that consumes as little power as possible in both active and static modes yet doesn’t sacrifice performance. The Atmel® SAM4L ARM® Cortex®-M4 based series is designed with this in mind.
The SAM4L microcontroller redefines low power, delivering the lowest power consumption in its class in active mode (90uZ/MHz) as well as in static mode with full RAM retention running. It also delivers the shortest wake-up time (1.5us). At the same time, this is the most efficient microcontroller available today, achieving up to 28 CoreMark/mA.
The SAM4L series integrates Atmel’s proprietary picoPower® technology
The SAM4L series integrates Atmel’s proprietary picoPower® technology, which ensures the devices are developed from the ground up—from transistor design to clocking options—to consume as little power as possible. In addition, Atmel Sleepwalking technology allows the peripherals to make intelligent decisions and wake up the system upon qualifying events at the peripheral level.
In this video, you will see how the SAM4L microcontroller supports multiple power configurations to allow the engineer to optimize its power consumption in different use cases. You will also see another good feature of the SAM4L series, Power Scaling, which is a technique to adjust the internal regulator output voltage to further reduce power consumption provided by the integrated Backup Power Manager Module. In addition, the SAM4L series comes with two regulator options to supply system power based on the application requirement. While the buck/switching regulator delivers much higher efficiency and is operational from 2 to 3.6V. The linear regulator has higher noise immunity and operates from 1.68 to 3.6V.
The Atmel® SAM4L ARM® Cortex®-M4 based Microcontroller
It’s all about system intelligence and conserving energy. Simply put, the SAM4L microcontroller is your choice if you are designing a product that requires long battery life but you don’t want to sacrifice performance. To get started, learn more about Atmel SAM4L Xplained Pro Evaluation and Starter Kits.
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