San Jose, CA, January 26, 2010 – Atmel® Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML), the leader in microcontroller and touch-based solutions, and Micro Digital, Inc. today announced immediate availability of a complete out-of-the-box board support package for Atmel’s AT91CAP9 starter and development kits. In this complete solution, Micro Digital will provide the board support package, while Atmel provides the AT91CAP9 (CAP9) starter and development kits. Micro Digital software includes SMX® RTOS, USB stacks, TCP/IP stack, File System, and WiFi support targeting the industrial and consumer markets to enable an easier, higher performing design. 

“We are excited to team with Micro Digital to provide designers a complete out-of-the-box solution for industrial and consumer designs using our CAP9 products,” said Jay Johnson, product marketing director for Atmel’s CAP products. “By combining Atmel’s AT91CAP9 value-added alternative to using a standard ARM9-based microcontroller plus an FPGA to Micro Digital’s board support package, designers can now quickly jumpstart their CAP9 projects. With Atmel’s AT91CAP9, the Metal Programmable block can be programmed with IP to create a single chip for many industrial and consumer markets that require a royalty-free RTOS like SMX.”

Micro Digital’s SMX board support package offers turn-key AT91CAP9 (ARM9) support, and fast time-to-market at minimal cost. Using the software package as an evaluation tool decreases programming costs and results in a more reliable end product. The small size and high speed of the SMX RTOS reduces the bill of materials (BOM) cost and enables CAP9 to handle more demanding applications. 

“As a pioneer in embedded software, we are thrilled to team with a leader in microcontroller technology to deliver a best-in-class solution,” said Ralph Moore, President of Micro Digital. “We believe this solution, which combines Micro Digital’s SMX RTOS with Atmel’s CAP9, will enable designers to bring their CAP9 projects to market before their competition.” 

More on the Out-of-the-box Solution

The core of SMX RTOS is the smx® real-time multitasking kernel. smxBSP for the Atmel AT91CAP9 processor family provides startup code and board support functions for MDI products and is included with smx. smxAware, also included with smx,extends the IAR debugger to display smx kernel objects, queues, and diagnostic information, as well as task, ISR, and LSR timelines, processor usage, and task stack usage. It also displays networking, USB, and file system information.

The smxNS TCP/IP stack is available for CAP9. An Ethernet driver for the CAP9 Ethernet controller provides turnkey TCP/IP support. Similarly, a USB device controller driver for CAP9 provides turnkey USB device support using the smxUSBD USB device stack. smxUSBD permits connecting an embedded device to a PC, laptop, PDA, or other USB host as though it were a USB disk drive, USB serial device, USB HID, Ethernet device (RNDIS), or audio device, as desired.

A USB host controller driver for the CAP9 USB host controller provides turnkey USB host support using the smxUSBH USB host stack. smxUSBH permits connecting USB peripherals to a CAP9 embedded device. Supported are: USB disk drive, serial device, modem (CDC ACM), USB to serial converter, USB to Ethernet converter, audio device, HID device, USB hub, printer, Sierra wireless dongles, and WiFi dongles.

An MMC/SD driver for CAP9 provides turnkey file system support using the smxFS FAT file system, which is media-compatible with Windows, thus providing easy transfer of information between a CAP9 embedded device and a Windows-based computer. The smxFS FAT file system can be seamlessly integrated with the USB stacks to provide USB disk access or emulation. A NAND flash driver is also available for CAP9.

smxWiFi, a recently added product, provides wireless communication for CAP9-based devices by using USB WiFi dongles. It is 802.11 a, b, g, i, and n compliant. 

All products work seamlessly with the SMX RTOS. A free smx and smxNS evaluation kit can be downloaded directly from www.smxrtos.com/eval. USB and file system demos can be downloaded from www.smxrtos.com/demo.

Availability and Pricing

Evaluation kits are available at no charge for qualified evaluators. All products are licensed on a per-product basis without royalties, and no per-developer charges. smxAware for the IAR Embedded Workbench is sold per development seat. 

Atmel’s AT91CAP9A-STK is available now for $750 USD and Atmel’s AT91CAP9A-DK is priced at $3500 USD.

MILPITAS, Calif., Jan. 26 /PRNewswire/ — Open-Silicon, Inc., a leading ASIC design and semiconductor manufacturing company, announced today that it has joined the Power Forward Initiative (PFI), an industry effort sponsored by Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ:CDNS) with the goal of enabling the design and production of more power-efficient electronic devices.

“Our customers have become very sensitive to power efficiency. Many mainstream designs, which were not traditionally power sensitive, are now paying close attention to power consumption due to exponential growth in leakage power and higher dynamic power from increasing levels of integration and performance,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, CEO and president of Open-Silicon. “We have demonstrated our commitment to building high-performance, low-power designs for our customers using our PowerMAX™ Technology. Now our move to join PFI reinforces our commitment to meet our customers’ needs.”

Open-Silicon’s MAX Technologies offer customers power saving advantages like back biasing, transistor transformations, and power recovery. The combination of the best low-power EDA design flows with Open-Silicon’s unique technologies allows building the best possible custom silicon. The company recently announced that Solarflare has successfully used PowerMAX in its second-generation SFC9020 Ethernet Controller with integrated 10Gb Ethernet PHY, which has been sampling to Tier1 server OEMs. This is the third generation of Solarflare silicon built by Open-Silicon, and the second designed using Open-Silicon’s PowerMAX technology to optimize the silicon for low power.

“The addition of Open-Silicon to the Power Forward Initiative demonstrates the ongoing strong industry support behind our mission,” said Neil Hand, director of low power solutions at Cadence Design Systems. “Open-Silicon’s extensive and varied design and manufacturing experience provides a unique perspective to the group and we look forward to the addition of the company.”

About Open-Silicon, Inc.

Open-Silicon, Inc. is a leading semiconductor company focused on SoC realization for traditional ASIC, develop-to-spec, and derivative ICs. Open-Silicon’s OpenModel brings together Open-Silicon’s engineering technology and high-quality manufacturing services with one of the broadest partner ecosystems for IC development, spanning IC design, open market IP integration, wafer fabrication, and assembly/test services. Open-Silicon received the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) award for Most Respected Private Semiconductor Company in 2008 and 2009. For more information, visit Open-Silicon’s website at www.open-silicon.com or call 408-240-5700.