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Fighting The Waste Of Energy!
New AVR® picoPower™ Technology
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Fighting The Waste Of Energy!
New AVR® picoPower™ Technology


With the new picoPower™ technology, ATMEL® will upgrade a number of the most popular AVR microcontrollers to achieve even lower power comsumption with the same performance.

picoPower

The increasing use of battery and signal line powered applications mandate low power solutions. ATMEL® has spent the last decade refining its technologies and architectures to achieve one of the industry’s lowest power consumption.
The culmination of this effort is its new picoPower™ technology which has been implemented in new ultra low-power 8-bit RISC AVR microcontrollers.
The picoPower™ technology incorporate a number of techniques for lower power consumption in sleep and active mode.
The key elements are :

  • True 1.8 Volt Supply Voltage
  • Minimized Leakage Current
  • Sleeping Brown Out Detection
  • Ultra Low Power 32 kHz Crystal Oscillator
  • Digital Input Disable Register
  • Clock Gating
  • Flash Sampling
 
The major existing AVR devices will be progressively converted to picoPower™ technology and new products are expected to benefit from the ultra low power capability. picoPower™ AVRs will be identified with a “P” added on the device name: i.e. ATmega169 becomes ATmega169P.
Four new picoPower™ µControllers

ATMEL®'s ATmega329P, ATmega3290P, ATmega325P & ATmega3250P are four new AVR picoPower™ microcontrollers.

They are upgrades versions of the popular 64-pin ATmega325 and ATmega329 and the 100-pin ATmega3250 and ATmega3290 AVRs.The two families are code compatible, but developers should study the migration notes if migrating from non-P to picoPower device.
Migration application notes describing how a developer should migrate a design to the new devices are available from www.atmel.com/avr

AVR507: Migration from ATmega329 to ATmega329P
AVR511: Migration from ATmega3290 to ATmega3290P

picoPower
As for the non-P devices, the devices with “9” in the part number integrate an internal LCD controller. The devices with “5” in the part number does not have an LCD controller.
picoPower™ AVRFamily Overview
picoPower™ AVRs without LCD controller
Device Flash RAM EEPROM Package
ATmega164P 16K 1K 512 DIL-40 / TQFP-44 / MLF-44
ATmega324P 32K 2K 1K DIL-40 / TQFP-44 / MLF-44
ATmega644P 64K 4K 2K DIL-40 / TQFP-44 / MLF-44
ATmega165P* 16K 1K 512 TQFP-64 / MLF-64
ATmega325P 32K 2K 1K TQFP-64 / MLF-64
ATmega3250P 32K 2K 1K TQFP-100
picoPower™ AVRs with LCD controller
Device Flash RAM EEPROM Package
ATmega169P* 16K 1K 512 TQFP-64 / MLF-64
ATmega329P 32K 2K 1K TQFP-64 / MLF-64
ATmega3290P 32K 2K 1K TQFP-100
* Sleeping BOD is not included on ATmega165P and ATmega169P
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