Atmel Introduces Microcontrollers for Automotive Networking

Atmel Corporation has announced the availability of a new family of AVR 8-bit microcontrollers for LIN Automotive networking applications. The ATtiny167 is 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.

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. 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.

"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."