AT91CAP Customizable Microcontrollers

Atmel's CAP™ is a microcontroller-based system-on-chip platform with fast local memory, a wide range of industry-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 in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of standard cell ASICs, but at a unit price close to that of standard cell devices.

Why choose ?

The advantages of this design approach are six-fold:

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. 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.
3. 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.
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. 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.
6. 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.

Atmel is a long-standing member of the ARM Connected Community.

Atmel is a Silver-level member of the Microsoft® Windows® Embedded Partner Program. A number of Atmel's ARM-based microcontrollers support the Windows CE® operating system.

Microsoft, Windows, and Windows CE are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Linux(R) support for Atmel's ARM9-based microcontrollers, including a free Board Support Package (BSP), is available from: