Atmel Introduces Family of AVR Microcontrollers for Automotive LIN Networking Applications
(Technology News, 04 Sep 2008 )
Atmel Corporation announced the availability of a new family of AVR 8-bit microcontrollers for LIN Automotive networking applications. The ATtiny167 is said to be the first device and is optimized to LIN slave applications. It will be qualified to AECQ-100 grade 0 and sustain ambient temperatures of up to 150 degrees Celsius. 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 request tiny LIN controllers with Analog/Digital converters for sensors signal formatting and a 16-bit 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 synchronization in slave mode. A frame processing request of only 2 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 1 Kbyte of Flash leaving about 15 Kbytes of Flash to the user application. Automatic synchronization is performed on each entering frame without calling for any CPU resources and Interrupt generation is limited to the extreme minimum to not jeopardize the real time capability of the application.
