World’s highest-performance ARM Cortex-M7 based MCUs

Atmel has announced it is shipping in mass production the highest performing ARM Cortex-M based MCUs on the market, the Atmel | SMART SAM S70 and E70 series. With 50% higher performance than the closest competitor, larger configurable SRAM, larger embedded Flash and high-bandwidth peripherals, these devices offer the ideal mix of connectivity, memory and performance. The SAM S70 and E70 series allow customers to scale-up performance and deliver SRAM and system functionality, while keeping the Cortex-M processor family ease-of-use and maximizing software reuse, says the company. “As a lead partner for the ARM Cortex-M7-based MCUs, we are excited to ship volume units of our SAM E70 and S70 MCUs to worldwide customers,” said Jacko Wilbrink, senior marketing director, Atmel. “Our SAM E70 and SAM S70 series deliver a robust memory and connectivity feature set, along with extensive software and third party support, enabling next-generation industrial, consumer and IoT designers the ability to differentiate their applications in a demanding market. We are working with hundreds of customers worldwide on a variety of applications using the new ARM Cortex-M7-based MCUs and look forward to mass adoption of these devices.” The devices deliver over four times the performance of current Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M based MCUs. Running at speeds up to 300 MHz and embedding larger configurable SRAM up to 384 KB and higher bandwidth peripherals, the new devices offer designers the right connectivity, SRAM and peripheral mix for industrial and connectivity designs. The SAM S70 and E70 devices also offer advanced memory architectures with up to 384KB of multi-port SRAM memory out of which 256KB can be configured as tightly coupled memory delivering zero wait state access at 300MHz. All devices come with high-speed USB Host and Device with on-chip high-speed USB PHY and Flash memory densities of 512kB, 1MB and 2MB. The Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M7-based MCUs are supported by ARM ecosystem partners on development tools and real-time operating system (RTOS) board support packages (BSPs) accelerating time-to-market. Software development tools are available on Atmel Studio, the ARM Keil MDK-ARM and IAR Embedded Workbench. Operating system support include Express Logic ThreadX, FreeRTOS, Keil® RTX, NuttX and Segger embOS. A comprehensive set of peripheral driver examples and open source middleware is provided in Atmel’s Software Package. Steve Pancoast, vice president of software applications, tools and development, Atmel, said: “Atmel has developed a global network of ecosystem partners that deliver hardware and software solutions for the Atmel SMART Cortex-M7 MCU. Atmel’s robust, easy-to-use development platform along with our partners’ advanced development platforms offer developers the opportunity to use the best tools and services to bring their designs quickly to market. Atmel continues to expand our partner program to bring the best tools and solutions to our customers.” Express Logic William E. Lamie, president, Express Logic, said: “With over two billion deployments, our ThreadX RTOS has established a reputation for reliability and high performance, directly aligning it with the ARM Cortex M7 and its focus as a fast, easy-to-use solution for the IoT and industrial markets. We are excited to support early ARM partners such as Atmel on the ARM Cortex M7-based MCUs for next-generation, high performance applications. With Atmel’s ultra-high performance Atmel |SMART SAM E70 and S70 families, the ThreadX RTOS enables many advanced features to help developers quickly, and seamlessly, get to market.” IAR “IAR Embedded Workbench provides a complete and powerful integrated development environment enabling developers to use the full potential of the Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex M7-based MCUs,” said Stefan Skarin, CEO, IAR Systems. “We’ve collaborated with Atmel for over a decade and have worked closely with them on the ARM Cortex M7-based MCUs. Developers using Atmel MCUs can be confident our comprehensive development tools enable them to create reliable code with maximized performance and get their products faster to market.” Keil “The Keil Microcontroller Development Kit seamlessly supports the latest ARM Cortex-M processors by providing developers with flexible tools to implement their applications,” said Reinhard Keil, Director, Microcontroller Tools, Development Solutions Group, ARM. “As a lead partner of the Cortex-M7, Atmel has worked closely with ARM to ensure developers have powerful software environments for the most demanding embedded applications running on Atmel SAM E70 and S70 devices.” NuttX “The NuttX RTOS focuses on deeply embedded environments and are compatible with 8- and 32-bit architectures,” said Gregory Nutt, Author, NuttX. “NuttX is an open source, royalty free RTOS available under the non-restrictive BSD license that works seamlessly with the Atmel ARM Cortex M7 solutions, with the option to scale with our rich set of files, libraries and standard Unix-like environment. We are thrilled to support the Atmel ARM Cortex M7 architecture for next-generation applications.” Segger “As one of the first tool vendors to support the ARM Cortex-M7 architecture, we ensure that early adopters can exploit the full potential of these high-performance devices,” said Dirk Akemann, Partnership Marketing Manager at SEGGER Microcontroller. “We worked closely with ARM and Atmel from day one to ensure our J-Link debug probes and middleware products work seamlessly for developers using ARM Cortex-M7 architecture. We are excited to support Atmel’s ARM Cortex-M7-based MCUs.”