Recently someone described the Internet of Things (IoT) as being the semiconductor classification that we used to call ‘other’. It’s a nice line but actually I think IoT really is something different from what we were already doing before. Although it is a market that cuts across medical, automotive, home-electronics, wearables and more, there really is a lot of commonality, the biggest one being connectivity. It really isn’t IoT if it isn’t, directly or indirectly, connected to the internet.
One company that is well positioned to ride the IoT wave is Atmel. They have a very broad range of microcontrollers at different power/price/performance points along with a number of connectivity solutions. Earlier this week they announced a new set of Wi-Fi SoCs and modules as part of its SmartConnect wireless portfolio. There are two new turnkey SoCs (WILC1000 and WINC1500) and four new modules featuring the SoCs.
The WINC1000 is an IEEE 802.11b/g/n network controller. The WILC100 is an IEEE 802.11b/g/n IoT link controller. These SoCs came to Atmel in the acquisition in July of New Port Media (NMI) and they have been seamlessly integrated in just two months.
Expanding on Atmel’s Wi-Fi offering, the WILC1000 and WINC1500 are SoC solutions optimized for battery-powered IoT applications. These wireless SoCs feature fully integrated power amplifiers for the industry’s best communication range, without compromising cost or performance. Both the WILC1000 and WINC1500 are add-on solutions which can connect to any Atmel MCU or eMPU targeting a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT), consumer and industrial applications. Both products are available either as fully-certified modules ready for production to accelerate a designer’s time-to-market or as discrete SoCs for customers requiring the highest design flexibility.
The WILC1000 and WINC1500 provide multiple peripheral interfaces including UART, SPI, SDIO and I2C. The only external clock source needed is a high-speed crystal or oscillator with a wide variety of reference clock frequencies supported (between 12 – 50 MHz) and are IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, RF, baseband, MAC certified. The WILC1000 is available now as a chip and three different modules. The WINC1500 is available now as a chip and a module, with an evaluation kit, featuring Atmel’s SAMD21 MCU.
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