Atmel has introduced three new members of the AVR Flash Microcontroller family for use in battery chargers, sensor end-points and low-end motor control applications. The three 14-pin tinyAVR products are pin compatible, differing only in the size of Flash, EEPROM and SRAM memory. ATtiny24 has 2kb of Self-Programmable, Flash memory, whereas ATtiny44 and ATtiny84 have 4kb and 8kb, respectively. All three deliver 20MIPS throughput when running at 20MHz.
Amtel says the ATtiny24/44/84 excel in battery-powered equipment due to their low power consumption and three low power sleep modes which can be selected individually. The application software can adjust the system clock frequency to achieve top performance when needed, and then slow down the clock during idle times.
Additional power saving is achieved by using the AVR Power Stop System allowing the user to turn off timers, USI and/or ADC when not in use. As a result, the ATtiny24/44/84 consume less than 100nA in Power Down mode.
ATtiny24/44/84 have internal EEPROM, pull-up resistors and an 8MHz, high precision, calibrated RC Oscillator, leaving 12 general I/O pins available for application use. The I/O pins can alternatively work as ADC inputs or PWM outputs depending on requirements.
The Universal Serial Interface (USI) provides the interface to ATtiny24/44/84s, which can be configured to work as an SPI, UART or TWI. Sensor applications exploits the internal temperature sensor which monitors chip temperature for system parameter calibration.