Atmel CAP Microcontroller-based SoC platform - AT91CAP9S Series

Atmel introduced AT91CAP9S series, a CAP microcontroller-based system-on-chip (SoC) platform, based on the ARM926EJ-S processor. Atmel’s CAP features fast local memory, a wide range of standard peripherals and interfaces, and a Metal Programmable (MP) Block that allows the designer to add custom logic. By combining the performance, density and low power consumption of the fixed portion of the device with the flexibility of the MP Block, CAP enables application-specific products to be developed significantly faster and lower cost compared to standard cell ASICs.

Atmel AT91CAP CAP Microcontroller

The advantages of CAP microcontroller-based SoC:

1. Risk is reduced since the ARM core and peripherals (over 70% of the design) are fully verified in silicon, the designer does not have to worry about any of the ARM design aspects – that work is already done.
2. The CAP cycle time for place & route and prototype fabrication is extremely short. Place & route is limited to the metal layers of the MP block and the ROM personalization layer; everything else is fixed. Fabrication time for prototypes is reduced since wafers are staged at the metal layers awaiting the Metal Programmable logic and ROM code from the designer. This cuts the fab cycle time in half.
3. Design time is reduced since the SoC portion of the design is complete and the designer only has to focus on the portion of logic that would otherwise be in an FPGA. This logic is captured in the MP Block of the CAP device.
4. Design cost savings: CAP NRE cost is significantly lower than that for standard cell ASICs. The total design cost for an ARM-based SoC using CAP technology is a fraction of that for a standard-cell equivalent, thanks to re-use of hardware/software functional blocks, reduced place & route effort and the smaller number of masks.
5. The CAP Emulation Board, industry-standard software development tools, operating systems and extensive re-usable software modules facilitate software development, and enable hardware and software development to proceed in parallel.
6. Low unit cost: In volume, CAP costs only slightly more than an equivalent standard cell ASIC, and much less than an MCU + FPGA combination for the same functionality.

The AT91CAP9S CAP microcontroller-based SoC offers a 200 MHz ARM926EJ-S core with 16 KBytes each of program and data cache, 32 KBytes of additional SRAM, 32 KBytes of ROM, EBI with error correction code (ECC) for NAND Flash/SmartMedia and 250K or 500K metal programmable gates.

The AT91CAP9S series include 10/100 Ethernet MAC, USB full-speed host and USB 2.0 high-speed device, image sensor interface, LCD controller, 2.0A/B CAN controller,  MCI, SSC, PWM, LCD and AC97 controllers,  two USARTs, SPI master and slave, three 16-bit timer counters, an 8-channel, 10-bit ADC, and a full complement of supervisory functions. The AT91CAP9S also include (optional) hardware AES/TDES encryption/decryption engines.

For evaluation and development, Atmel offer the AT91CAP9-DK development board. This development kit  implements the fixed portion of the CAP device as a microcontroller standard product, coupled MP Block (emulate by FPGA) . Atmel’s CAP also supported by the same third-party development tools as Atmel’s standard product AT91SAM ARM-based MCUs, including C/C++ compilers, in-circuit emulators and debuggers.

The AT91CAP9S CAP microcontroller-based SoC is priced at $13 each (for 100K units)

CAP NRE starts at $150K, to cover netlist implementation/placement&routing in the Metal Programmable Block, mask costs, fabrication, testing and delivery of prototypes.

Source: Atmel AT91CAP CAP Microcontroller-based SoC