Semiconductor solutions developer Atmel Corp. (San Jose, CA), a member of the Z-One™ Digital Power Alliance, announced the availability of its new ATAVRSB100, a smart battery development kit. The ATAVRSB100 is based on Atmel's ATmega406, an integrated, single-chip, smart battery AVR® device, targeting lithium-ion batteries for laptop computers, medical equipment, and portable instrumentation. It demonstrates the smart battery monitoring and protection capabilities while reducing the time to market for new smart battery designs.
The ATmega406 is a flash-based microcontroller solution that integrates a voltage regulator, fully autonomous battery protection, more than 99 percent accurate monitoring capabilities, FET control, and cell balancing FETs, to allow the implementation of a complete smart battery design with a limited number of external components.
The ATAVRSB100 development board is made of a full smart battery implementation and three different support modules, to simulate individual cell voltage, total cell stack voltage, and charge/discharge current. The modules let developers simulate critical battery situations on request, without the risk and the complexity of using real battery cells. Numerous connectors are available to connect battery cells and to perform debugging and programming of the device, thus allowing developers to implement changes to the reference design and fully evaluate the changes before any batteries are connected.
The ATAVRSB100 is available now and is priced at $299. The ATmega406 is in full volume production, with pricing starting at $3.10 for 10,000-unit quantities.
