Cortex-A5 MPUs Suit MIPS-Hungry Applications

Atmel is shipping the SAMA5D3 series, its highest-performance, low-power memory protection units (MPUs) based on the ARM Cortex-A5 core. The company says it is responding to requirements from the market for more processing power in industrial, consumer electronics, and white goods applications. Atmel developed the series using a 65-nm low-power process technology to deliver up to 850DMIPS at 536 MHz while offering 1328 Mbytes/s at 166-MHz bus speed. The floating-point unit (FPU) also provides additional high-precision processing power for image, audio, and sensor data. Power consumption is under 200 mW in active mode at maximum speed and below 0.5 mW in low-power mode when retaining context and offering fast wake-up. The series also embeds a comprehensive peripheral set including a dual Ethernet port (one Gigabit), 3x high-speed USB ports, dual CAN, thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD controller with graphics accelerator for image composition, camera interface, SDIO/SD/MMC, UARTs, serial peripheral interfaces (SPIs), two-wire interfaces (TWIs), soft modem, 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), and 32-bit timers.

ATMEL