AT90S8515 – Legacy!
Some people asked for some of those older Atmel parts after seeing the MEGA88 and ATMEGA169 teardowns. Here’s a quick one on the AT90S8515. It’s still very popular even though it’s been replaced by the MEGA8515. It’s built on a larger process and it’s not planarized (.50um and below are planarized but you may find some .50um non-planarized) 8KB Flash, 512 Byte SRAM, 512 Byte EEPROM with 32 working registers. That’s sooo nice! 4x faster than the typical PIC. There was a mistake in the above picture too when we…
Atmega169P (Quick Peek)
We were curious if Atmel has finally shrunk the AVR series smaller than the current 350nm 3 metal layer process. Their main competitors (Microchip) have began showing 350nm 4 metal layer devices and Atmel has a few new product lines out (CAN, Picopower, and USB featured devices). We chose to examine their picoPower line of AVR’s since they claim true 1.8v operation. The only picoPower device in stock from Digikey was the ATMEGA169P. We used the 64 pin…