Atmel® Corporation, the renowned organization in designing and manufacturing of microcontrollers and advanced logic announced here today that Atmel has licensed the ARM1176JZF-S™ processor for execution in high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) products.

Atmel, founded in 1984, is a renowned leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. The company through influencing one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, has been able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions. It is recorded as one of the minority elite new companies who are capable of incorporating dense nonvolatile memory, logic and analog functions on a single chip. The Atmel chips are manufactured through the usage of the most advanced wafer processes that includes BiCMOS, CMOS and Silicon Germanium (SiGe) technologies. It is also found to be concentrating on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets.

It has come to the knowledge, that the ARM1176JZF-S core clocks at up to 620MHz in 90nm technology at the time of achieving a power consumption as low as 0.45 mW/MHz. It also features ARM Trust Zone® technology for enhanced security, ARM Jazelle® technology for efficient embedded Java execution, and ARM Intelligent Energy Manager (IEM™) technology that can reduce processor energy consumption by 25% to 50%. ARM Trust Zone technology endows with support within the processor architecture for the trusted computing environments that is required for the protection of critical system functions from downloaded applications, copyright protection of downloaded media, and secures over-the-air system upgrades.

The ARM1176JZF-S also features an integrated floating-point co-processor making it suitable mostly for embedded 3D-graphics applications. The core runs the ARMv6 instruction set with media processing extensions and the Thumb® instruction set extensions for compact code. It is fully upward code-compatible with Atmel's existing licensed cores, the ARM7TDMI® and the ARM926EJ-S™ processors.

While speaking on its latest approach, Mr. Alfredo Vadillo, the Managing Director for 32-bit MCUs said, “The licensing of the ARM1176JZF-S processor reinforces Atmel's long-term commitment to the ARM® architecture as one of the industry standards for 32-bit microcontrollers. We were one of the first licensees of the ARM7™ processor family and have extended our partnership with ARM through the ARM9™ processor family and now to the ARM11™ processor family. Together with our proprietary AVR®32 architecture, Atmel offers the industry's broadest range of 32-bit Flash microcontroller-based system solutions”.

Mr. John Cornish, the VP Marketing, Processor Division, ARM expressing his views said, “Atmel is a leading microcontroller vendor with an extensive portfolio of ARM technology-based devices featuring the ARM7 and ARM9 family processors. Atmel's decision to use the ARM1176JZF-S processor in future system-on-chip (SoC) products highlights the importance of the fast growing 32-bit market and the widespread adoption of the ARM architecture”.