The new ATtiny43U is a perfect fit for the portable battery powered consumer applications such as phone accessories, remote controls, sporting goods and personal care products.
A regular AA or AAA battery has voltage of up to 1.8V fully charged. When energy is drawn from battery, the battery voltage drops as battery discharges, down to 0.7V where there is hardly any energy at all left in the battery. The new ATtiny43U has an on-chip boost regulator that works from the battery voltages between 0.7 and 1.8V. The regulator converts low battery voltage up to 3V, this is sufficiently high to effectively operate AVR MCU, its peripherals and I/Os. The boost regulator can offer enough current to the I/O pins to directly drive the LEDs and electric motors. The new ATtiny43U also features a 10-bit ADC, two 8-bit timer counters with the PWM outputs, SPI, I2C interface, internal temperature sensor, and has up to 8 MIPS throughput running from a 0.7V battery.
With the introduction of the Ultra Low Voltage tinyAVR microcontrollers we are expanding the popular AVR product family into a new market segment. The ATtiny43U features an internal regulator that removes the need for multiple batteries or complex external boost regulators, this reduces the physical size, time to market, and bill of material for battery powered applications, stated Jukka Eskelinen director, tinyAVR product marketing.
Like all the other AVR MCUs, the ATtiny43U features an on-chip debug system for the easy, fast, and robust development. All new tinyAVR MCUs use the standard AVR MCU development tools.
