Atmel’s Xplain evaluation and demonstration kits are not yet available to buy, so the lucky recipients will be among the very few members of the public to actually possess them.
The Xplain is an easy-to-use evaluation and demonstration kit for the Atmel’s ATxmega128A1, offering a complete hardware solution for evaluating the highly accurate analog functionality of the device. The ADC can be used to read a temperature sensor and a potentiometer, and the DAC can be used to generate sound on a mono speaker.
Xplain also demonstrates how to interface external memories; the kit features 8MByte SDRAM and 8MByte DataFlash connected to the ATxmega128A1. Eight push buttons and eight LEDs are available for user interaction.
The kit is powered from USB. The USB interface is a communication gateway between the ATxmega128A1 and an USB COM port.
ATxmega128A1
The ATxmega128A1 is part of Atmel’s XMEG A1 family of low power, high performance and peripheral rich CMOS 8/16-bit microcontrollers, which are based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. By executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the XMEGA A1 achieves throughputs approaching 1MIPS per MHz, allowing the system designer to optimize power consumption versus processing speed.
The AVR CPU combines a rich instruction set with 32 general purpose working registers. All the 32 registers are directly connected to the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), allowing two independent registers to be accessed in one single instruction, executed in one clock cycle. The resulting architecture is more code efficient, while achieving throughputs many times faster than conventional single-accumulator or CISC based microcontrollers. The XMEGA A1 devices have five software selectable power saving modes.
The device is manufactured using Atmel’s high-density nonvolatile memory technology. The program Flash memory can be reprogrammed in-system through the PDI or JTAG. A Bootloader running in the device can use any interface to download the application program to the Flash memory.
The XMEGA A1 devices are supported with a full suite of program and system development tools including: C compilers, macro assemblers, program debugger/simulators, programmers and evaluation kits.
