Many manufacturers build microcontrollers on the ARM Cortex-M3 core. Atmel offers two families of 32-bit devices.
- AVR32 — a proprietary architecture for high-reliability applications: automotive and railway transport, harsh industrial environments.
- ARM — a line for the consumer market and for industry with standard reliability requirements.
SAM7 / SAM3 / SAM4 chips
They share a common design: a core, Flash program memory, SRAM for data and a boot ROM. The bootloader accepts a binary file over UART or USB and writes it to Flash.
32-bitbus width
4–7simultaneous data streams
The internal multilayer bus can carry four to seven data streams at the same time, which boosts the performance of the whole system.