Neil Harrison, President Europe, Farnell Element14 (on right) and Peter Jeutter, Senior Director Distribution Sales, EMEA Atmel (on left) conclude the signing of a full-line distribution agreement. The extensive range of Atmel’s advanced devices and development kits will now be available from Farnell element14.

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Farnell element14 today announced a new stocking distribution agreement with Atmel Corporation, a leader in microcontroller and touch solutions. Atmel® offers microcontrollers, capacitive touch products, advanced logic, mixed signal, non-volatile memory products and radio frequency components. These technologies are used to optimise performance, efficiency and connectivity in today’s most advanced system designs, ranging from tablet computers to industrial security systems.

The Atmel portfolio at Farnell element14 offers everything a designer needs to design, debug and deploy new solutions, including Atmel AVR® 8-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, ARM® processor-based solutions, wireless microcontroller products, 8051 architecture products, development kits and programming tools and software.

Farnell’s element14 community has become the go-to resource for engineers, offering collaboration with experts and peers, a technical library, and the Knode – an intelligent online search and knowledge tool that helps designers to research, select and buy the right solutions from the beginning stages of their design.

“With Farnell element14, customers can now quickly find the right Atmel solutions for their designs, and potentially have them delivered the same day,” said Peter Jeutter, senior director of distribution sales, EMEA, Atmel Corporation. “Farnell element14’s online marketplace further enhances the procurement options available for design engineers that require Atmel’s solutions.”

“We are excited to join Atmel’s distribution network with an agreement that extends our commitment to provide the engineering community a complete system solution from a single source,” said Neil Harrison, President, Farnell element14. “Engineers can now select from a wide range of advanced devices and development kits plus other resources from Atmel’s extensive portfolio. They can also tap into our intelligent online search/knowledge tool to help them make the right decisions. Furthermore, we can offer a flexible ordering system so that engineers can order in quantities as small as one unit to meet their unique project requirements.”

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Mouser Electronics, Inc., known for its rapid introduction of the newest products, today announced it is stocking new product from Atmel. The Atmel AT91SAM9M10 multimedia-enabled high-performance embedded microprocessor (MPU) combines user interfaces, video playback, and connectivity.

The AT91SAM9M10 is an ARM926-based device running at 400MHz. This Atmel MPU includes a hardware video decoder, a 2D accelerator, an LCD controller, a resistive touchscreen, a camera interface, audio, Ethernet 10/100, and high-speed USB and SDIO. The Atmel AT91SAM9M10 MPU is targeted at media rich display and control panels in industrial application segments, such as home and commercial buildings, POS terminals, entertainment systems, Internet appliances, and medical.

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Farnell Adds 1300 New Products

Farnell, the leading multi-channel distributor, is placing additional focus on multimedia technology with addition of over 1300 new products specifically for use in this pervasive, exciting and rapidly developing area of technology.

Mobile multimedia devices have become affordable mainstream products for the mass market as have technologies such as LCD and plasma television and video servers. Recognising the need to give designers easy access to the very latest technology in this fast moving sector, Farnell now offers a total of 3200 products from over 112 suppliers including industry leading names such as Freescale, Maxim, Texas Instruments and Atmel.

Multimedia also provides the focus for the latest issue of Farnell’s Technology First journal which contains a range of informative articles that aim to help demystify some of the aspects of designing for multimedia applications. Popular regular features such as RoadTest and MarketWatch can also be found in the publication. Downloadable PDF and interactive online versions of the journal are available and can be accessed via the homepage of the Farnell website.

Commenting on the company’s focus on multimedia, Jamie Furness, Technology Development Manager, Farnell said: “Multimedia is perhaps the most rapidly evolving sector of the electronics industry. Consumer driven demand is leading designers to face tough challenges to integrate previously separate functionality into what are often small and portable form factors. Our focus on multimedia is timely and underlines our dedication to giving designers fast access to the very latest multimedia technologies from the most innovative suppliers.”

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Atmel microcontrollers from Nu Horizons eliminate excess power consumption in cost-constrained applications

Available from Nu Horizons Electronics, the two latest additions to Atmel’s tinyAVR family of microcontrollers are the ATtiny48 and ATtiny88. The new 32-pin devices are pin compatible with Atmel’s ATmega48 and -88 parts and offer feature optimised alternatives for cost-constrained applications.

The new microcontrollers use most of the features of Atmel’s picoPower technology to eliminate excess power consumption. They include brown-out detection circuitry that can be turned off during sleep modes, a power reduction register that powers down individual peripherals, and digital input disable registers that remove leakage current on ADC input pins.

ATtiny48 and -88 are suitable for a wide range of applications in consumer, communications and industrial electronics where the application code is moderate, but many I/O pins are needed. Low power capability also makes the new devices suitable for battery-powered or power constrained systems. Target applications include: white goods, remote access systems, HVAC, mobile phones, battery chargers, industrial control, health care, wireless equipment and peripherals.

The ATtiny48 features 4kBytes of in-system self-programmable Flash, and the ATtiny88, 8kBytes. Both parts include a 64 byte in-system programmable EEPROM, internal temperature sensor, 10-bit ADC and a byte-oriented I2C interface for 400kHz I2C communication.

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Arrow is Atmel’s European Distributor of Year

Arrow Electronics has received a Distributor of the Year award from Atmel Corporation in recognition of the engineering-led growth it has achieved in Europe.

Arrow handles the full range of Atmel’s semiconductor products including logic, memory, PLDs, and microcontrollers. Atmel’s European Distributor of the Year award recognises Arrow’s performance in the region across this product range.

Adrian Elms, Atmel’s North Europe Distribution Manager, said: “Among the reasons that Arrow has secured this prestigious award are the company’s focus on engineering support for the design-in of Atmel solutions and the close cooperation between the two companies.”

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