ATMEL Device Extends Battery Life

ATMEL’s picoPower technology reduces “power-save” consumption to as little as 650nA, even with the 32kHz clock running and superior brown-out detection.

The two picoPower devices now available are the ATmega169P with a 4x25 segment LCD controller, and the ATmega165P general purpose microcontroller.

Fourteen additional 8-bit picoPower AVR microcontrollers will be added within the next 12 months. PicoPower microcontrollers consume down to 340uA in active mode, 150uA in idle mode at 1MHz, 650nA in power-save mode and 100nA in power-down mode. They will be pin-, performance- and code-compatible with existing AVR microcontrollers.

Atmel’s picoPower technology uses an ultra low power 32kHz crystal oscillator, automatic disabling and re-enabling of brown out detection (BOD) circuitry during sleep modes, a power reduction register (PRR) that completely powers down individual peripherals, and digital input disable registers that turn off the digital inputs to specific pins.

The ATmega165P and the ATmega169P are available now in production quantities of 64-pin TQFP and 64-pin QFN packages.

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