Atmel rolls $399 customizable MCU kit

San Jose, CA, September 1, 2008—Atmel today announced its AT91CAP7X-STK Starter Kit for evaluating its ARM7-based CAP family of customizable MCUs. The starter kit, designed to speed migration of ARM7-plus-FPGA designs to single chip solutions, features Atmel's ARM7-based AT91CAP7S microcontroller, an Altera Cyclone II FPGA. Atmel claims its single-chip solution delivers 30% lower unit cost, 8x performance, and 70% less active power consumption compared to ARM-plus-FPGA solutions.

Figure 1. AT91CAP7X-STK Starter Kit

Board peripherals include a 2.8" TFT LCD panel, joystick, 64M Bytes of SDRAM, 10-bit ADC, 256M Bytes of NAND flash and a 4MB DataFlash. External interfaces include USB full-speed device, four analog inputs, external bus interface (EBI), USART, SPI, and Debug UART. The board also supports sensing applications with light and temperature sensors and potentiometers.

The CAP7 starter kit allows designers to evaluate a custom design without incurring any NRE charges or spending thousands of dollars for a full development board. For final development work, Atmel offers the AT91CAP7-DK. The AT91CAP7-DK allows designers to take full advantage of the CAP7's multi-layer high-speed bus (AHB) and peripheral DMA.

The AT91CAP7X-STK Starter Kit is now available and is priced at $399. For more information visit http://www.atmel.com/products/AT91CAP/