Atmel Corporation, a provider of microcontroller- and touch-based solutions, reportedly announced that Xirgo Technologies selected Atmel's (News - Alert) Cortex-M3-based product family for its next-generation enhanced-battery-life asset tracking platform.

 

Xirgo Technologies provides customized machine-to-machine or “M2M” devices and solutions to leading companies in automotive insurance, fleet tracking, vehicle financing, and dealer lot inventory verticals.

 

The company is designing its next-generation M2M platform to address the long battery life requirements of portable tracking solutions, for the emerging cargo and package tracking verticals.

 

Atmel's Cortex-M3-based Flash microcontrollers offer increased processing power and enhanced power efficiency necessary for on-device application support to substantially reduce data transmission costs, while maximizing battery life, according to company officials.

 

The successor of highly successful ARM7TDMI-based SAM7S series, Atmel's SAM3S-series enables an easy migration path for SAM7S customers to a 50 percent more powerful, lower power and feature-rich Flash MCU, while preserving hardware and software investments, say company officials.

 

To illustrate its efficiency, at maximum operating frequency of 64 MHz the device consumes only 1.45 mW / MHz. Atmel's SAM3 Cortex-M3 MCUs add new peripheral functionality including high-speed USB, SD/SDIO/MMC and SPI, on-die termination resistors.

 

With these features, the Cortex-M3 simplify PCB design, parallel IO signal capture, memory protection unit, external memory scrambler and 12-bit analog converters expanding their market opportunities in different applications including test and measurement, 802.15.4 wireless networking, PC, cell phone and gaming peripherals, they added.

 

“The Atmel Cortex-M3 family's broad on-chip peripheral support and hardware and software compatibility with older Atmel ARM7TDMI-based microcontrollers provides an easy migration path for next-generation devices that have more demanding power optimization and processing power requirements,” Kris Kelkar, CEO at Xirgo, said in a statement.

Atmel recently announced collaboration with H&D Wireless to deliver an IEEE802.11b+g Wi-Fi solution for Atmel's 32-bit AVR microcontrollers.  Under this partnership, H&D Wireless will provide the SPB104 WiFi (News - Alert) extension board which is easily connected to the AVR32 UC3 evaluation kits through the SD card socket.

This collaboration, according to company officials, will result in an efficient Wireless Fidelity or “WiFi” solution with overall power consumption five times lower than any other similar solution on the market.