Embedded System Product News

Atmel ATtiny Microcontrollers have 6 Pins, ADC, and LOW Power Consumption

Atmel today introduced three new Atmel ATtiny microcontrollers. The new Atmel ATtiny4, ATtiny5, and ATtiny9 are based on the 8-bit tinyAVR core and at only six pins, are pin and code compatible the existing Atmel ATtiny10 6-pin microcontroller.

According to Atmel, these new ATtiny microcontrollers run code six times faster than their closest competitor.

Atmel ATtiny Pinout

Atmel ATtiny Features
Features of the new Atmel ATtiny include:

• 8-bit Atmel tinyAVR core
• 1.8V to 5.5V operating range
• 512Bytes or 1.0KBytes Flash (10,000 Erase/Write cycles)
• 32Bytes SRAM
• Watchdog Timer with dedicated oscillator
• 16-bit Timer
• 2-channel PWM
• 4-channel 8-bit ADC on ATtiny5 and ATtiny10
• Analog Comparator
• Four multi-function pins

Atmel ATtiny 4,5,9,10 Block Diagram

The Atmel ATtiny microcontrollers boast a 100nA sleep current. In sleep mode, these microcontrollers can quickly wake up on any pin change interrupt, OR an ADC conversion, OR a comparator event.

One low pin-count application example of these new Atmel ATtiny microcontroller is for lighting ballast applications. As the ADC converts data from an ambient light sensor, one PWM output drives the lamp to the appropriate brightness.

These Atmel ATtiny microcontrollers are manufactured using Atmel's proprietary 35K4 process. Introduced in 2002, this is an 0.35µ process with 0.25µ metal.

"The ATtiny10 was launched in April and we were overwhelmed by the rapid market acceptance and strong demand for this device, which is the smallest AVR microcontroller. It is clear that developers needed innovation in this market segment," said Jukka Eskelinen, Product Marketing Director, tinyAVR for Atmel Corporation. "Atmel is now expanding the offering with three new parts with different memory densities and feature sets. With more parts available, engineers can cost optimize their applications without sacrificing the features they need."

Atmel ATtiny Development Tools
The Atmel tinyAVR and ATtiny microcontrollers all use Atmel's standard AVR development tools. The Atmel AVR Studio is a free development environment for writing and debugging Atmel AVR applications. AVR Studio is compatible with Windows 9x/NT/2000/Vista (both 32-bit and 64-bit).

AVR Studio includes a full-featured IDE including assembler, linker, and simulator. Atmel's white paper "Novice's Guide to AVR Development" is available to guide Engineers new to the AVR.

Availability and Pricing
Samples of the Atmel ATtiny4, ATtiny5, and ATtiny9 are available now. Pricing for 5K units start at US $0.34.

Atmel ATtiny Comparison

About Atmel
"Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of capacitive touch solutions, microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets."