Atmel® Corporation the renowned organization in designing and manufacturing of microcontrollers and advanced logic announced here today of the CAP microcontroller-based system-on-chip (SoC) platform for complex applications that require fast time-to-market. It has been avowed in this regard, that CAP features high-speed local memory, a wide range of industry-standard peripherals and interfaces, and a high-capacity metal programmable (MP) block enabling the designer towards adding a significant amount of custom logic on-chip.

In addition, through the means of leveraging the architecture of Atmel's market-leading AT91SAM microcontrollers, the new CAP metal programmable microcontroller platform makes application-specific products possible to be developed in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of a conventional standard-cell or gate array ASIC, but at a unit price close to that of standard-cell devices. Stocks of CAP platforms are held prior to metal layer fabrication, allowing prototypes to be delivered rapidly, and accelerating volume production.

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.

While enquiring about the product it was conformed by the concerned persons of the Atmel® Corporation that CAP is based on Atmel's Metal Programmable Cell Fabric (MPCF). It is utilized so as to provide nearly identical routed gate densities to those of standard cells in the same process.

It has also been found that the initial CAP product introduction is comprised of the AT91CAP9S series, based on the ARM926EJ-S™ processor. The AT91CAP9S offers a 200 MHz ARM926EJ-S core with 16 KBytes each of program and data cache, 32 KBytes of additional SRAM, 32 KBytes of ROM, EBI with error correction code (ECC) for NAND Flash/SmartMedia® and 250K or 500K metal programmable gates. Peripherals include both a USB full-speed host and USB 2.0 high-speed device, 10/100 Ethernet MAC, image sensor interface, 2.0A and 2.0B CAN controller, LCD controller, MCI, SSC, PWM, LCD and AC97 controllers, SPI master and slave, two USARTs, three 16-bit timer counters, an 8-channel, 10-bit analog to digital converter, and a full complement of supervisory functions. Optional hardware AES/TDES encryption/decryption engines are also included. The AT91CAP9S is built around a multi-layered bus and a distributed DMA architecture for the high internal data bandwidth required by deeply embedded networked applications.
The dual-core architectures, as has been informed, can be created by the instantiation of an additional ARM® core, Atmel's proprietary AVR® processor or a DSP core in the MP Block. Bus master controls are brought into the MP Block, and DMA access can be provided to the system bus.