Atmel has announced that its six pin ATtiny10 microcontroller can provide six times the performance of any similar sized microcontroller in the market.

The picoPower AVR ATtiny10 has 1Kbytes of programmable flash memory and 32bytes of internal SRAM. It features up to 12MIPS of processing throughput, 8bit A/D converter, analogue comparator and a 16bit timer with PWM.

Using the AVR CPU, the ATtiny10 is said to provide six times the performance of any other similar sized microcontroller in the market. Designed to reduce the time in active mode, increases the time spent in power saving sleep modes. The only similar product that has been on the market for 5 years is the PIC10F family. Will a device with 32 bytes of RAM need 12 MIPS of performance or will the lowest price be the most important feature? The published price for the PIC10F starts at $0.29 in 10k quantities, the ATtiny10 at $0.35, that is more than 20% higher cost than the PIC.

Samples of the ATtiny10 are available now. Volume price for 10k units is USD $0.35.

Some internal oscillator characteristics of the ATtiny10. Temperature drift plus voltage drift are up to 5% each from min to max. voltage or temperature. Do not attempt to use this device to emulate a serial interface, your data might get lost or worse falsified.

The internal oscillator of the PIC10 has similar characteristics but a much better specification towards the absolute value of 4 MHz. It is a workable solution to use a temp range from 0C-85C and a voltage range between 2.5V and 5.5V and have a max. frequency tolerance of +/- 2%

Power comparison:
The AVR (based on figure 17-4 in the preliminary Datasheet) uses about 220 uAs running at 1 MHz, 2V. The PIC10F220 needs 175 uAs running at 4 MHz, where it has the same performance as the 1 MHz AVR.

If you are interested for an in depth comparison of the two families you can purchase a 5 page report for $299 by requesting it from
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