Microcontrollers connect with automotive networks

The ATtiny167 is the first device in a new family of AVR 8bit microcontrollers for LIN automotive networking applications.

Atmel has a new family of AVR 8bit microcontrollers for LIN automotive networking applications.

The ATtiny167 is the first device and is optimised to LIN slave applications.

It will be qualified to AECQ-100 grade 0 and sustain ambient temperatures up to 150C.

Combined with a LIN transceiver such as ATA662x or ATA666x it brings a complete solution for sensors in a gearbox, exhaust gas system, pumps or turbo.

Many automotive body electronic subsystems such as door locks, window lift, wipers, lighting systems, sun and rain sensors are connected via LIN networks.

They need tiny LIN controllers with A/D convertors for sensors signal formatting and a 16bit PWM channel to control half-bridge drivers such as Atmel's ATA6831/32 or H-bridge motors control such as Atmel's ATA6223.

The ATtiny167 includes a hardware LIN UART with automatic baud rate synchronisation in slave mode.

A frame processing request of only two interrupts, one for LIN identifier available and one for transmit or receive completed.

Thanks to the collaboration with Mentor Graphics, a leading manufacturer of software tools and software components for automotive networking, a complete hardware and LIN software networking solution is available.

With integrated hardware routines, the code size for LIN is reduced to about 1Kbyte of Flash leaving about 15Kbyte of Flash to the user application.

Automatic synchronisation is performed on each entering frame without calling for any CPU resources and Interrupt generation is limited to the extreme minimum to not jeopardise the real time capability of the application.

"One of the critical requirements for using embedded processors in the automotive market is the availability of an effective and well-supported LIN communication stack", said Michel Passemard, Director of Automotive MCU Tactical Marketing at Atmel.

As a founding member of the LIN consortium and with extensive experience in developing embedded software for communication systems, Mentor Graphics helps by gathering the requirements of OEMs with respect to LIN and synthesise them into the LIN specification since 1999.

"We're happy to support Atmel's latest product with our latest version of LTP based on the LIN2.1 standard", said Joachim Langenwalter, Director of Mentor's Automotive Network Design business unit.

"Our efforts are focused on making the most efficient implementation with respect to memory footprint and speed, while implementing the standard and testing according to the latest conformance tests".

"As a result our LIN implementation is particularly well suited to support slave applications used in very small microcontrollers".

Atmel's AVR Studio and AVR JTAGICE mkII, provide a multiplatform integrated development environment (IDE).

The STK600 with STK600-SOIC addon starter kit is available to start development.

Samples for the ATtiny167 are available now.

Packages are available in a 20-pin SOIC, 20-pin TSSOP and 32-pin QFN.

The ATtiny167 will be qualified at 125C in all packages and 150C in QFN and TSSOP packages.

It will be available for volume production in December 2008.

Prices start at US $1.48 in 10,000-unit quantities for the 125C-qualified version.

The ATtiny87 and ATtiny327, with 8 and 32Kbyte Flash, respectively, will be introduced later in Q4 2008.

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