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Atmel Introduces New Highly Configurable 8-Channel LED Driver Family For Monitors and Industrial LCD Panel Backlighting

San Jose, CA, October 1, 2012 – Atmel® Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML), a leader in microcontroller and touch technology solutions, today announced a new family of 8-channel LED drivers with an integrated boost controller to deliver a complete power management system with patented Efficiency Optimizer (EO) to enhance power efficiency for LCD backlighting applications.

Atmel’s MSL3080/86/88 LED drivers are ideal for industrial LCD backlighting applications such as instrumentation, medical, avionics, military, kiosk, automotive and rugged displays.

The MSL3080/86/88 LED drivers also feature proprietary control scheme and robust design delivering greater than 92 percent power efficiency for up to 20W LED backlit LCD displays.

When combined with Atmel AVR® microcontrollers (MCUs), including tinyAVR® and megaAVR® MCUs, the MSL3080/86/88 LED drivers provide an unprecedented degree of flexibility, comprehensive fault and system monitoring as well as over 5000:1 PWM dimming range for the most demanding applications.

Atmel’s MSL3086/88 devices feature automatic string phasing that enables low electromagnetic interference (EMI) and eliminates audible noise. The MSL3088 LED driver offers video sync input for applications that require  synchronization with LCD refresh, such as small televisions and monitors eliminating artifacts such as waterfall noise and ghosting effects.

The MSL3080 driver allows designers to operate the internal current sinks in parallel for higher LED currents, up to 480mA.

“High power efficiency is a rapidly growing requirement in today’s LED backlit industrial and monitor LCD displays,” said Miguel Mendoza, sr. product marketing engineer at Atmel Corporation.”High performance industrial displays demand wide dimming range for all types of ambient light conditions from low light to daylight, system and fault monitoring capabilities. The MSL3080/86/88 product family allows our customers to design display solutions to achieve these requirements.”

Pricing and Availability

Atmel’s MSL3080/86/88 devices are available now. To help accelerate a designer’s project, an Atmel MSL308X EV evaluation kit is also available. Pricing for 1,000-piece quantities start at US$1.98. Contact your local Atmel representative or distributor for additional pricing and availability.
To see the latest videos, visit the Atmel YouTube Channel at www.atmel.com/youtube or follow Atmel on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook for more news.

About Atmel

Atmel Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, capacitive touch solutions, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry’s broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on industrial, consumer, communications, computing and automotive markets.

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