It has been announced here by the Atmel® Corporation, the renowned organization in designing and manufacturing of microcontrollers and advanced logic announced here today of its expansion of its CAP family of customizable microcontroller-based System-on-a-Chip products with an ARM7 core. It has been found that the innovative CAP7 customizable microcontroller is architecturally well-matched with the broad range of Atmel's off-the-shelf ARM7-based MCUs and therefore slots in Metal Programmable Cell Fabric or the MPCF technology to integrate up to 450K equivalent ASIC gates in a metal programmable block for the adaptation of custom logic netlist. What's more, Atmel's stretchy design flow consents to an easy path of alteration from the FPGA netlist to the metal programmable block.

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 or SiGe technologies. It is also found to be concentrating on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets.

While being enquire by this correspondent, Jay Johnson, the Director of Marketing of Atmel said,   "Design engineers frequently use programmable ICs to accelerate their proprietary DSP algorithms in a gate array technology. Many choose FPGAs which represent a flexible, cost-effective solution for market-testing new products, when volumes cannot be predicted. However, once production ramp begins and controlling bill of materials is a priority, our CAP7 customizable MCUs offer a painless cost reduction path, without the typical NRE and long development cycle associated with a standard cell ASIC."

Through the expunging of an external FPGA, the customizable microcontrollers of Atmel remain in a position to reduce IC costs by a measure of 50% at best.   In addition, in medium volumes (50K units), a 1 to 2M gate FPGA and ARM7 MCU, 2-chip solution, the market price ranges between $13 and $20. With unit prices under $6, CAP7 can cut the cost by more than half. As well, with an 80MHz CAP7, designers can carry out double performance with an acute reduction of power consumption by 90% if it gets compared to 1 to 2 watt FPGA solutions.