AT91CAP7E is an ARM7™-based MCU with a direct FPGA interface, six-layer advanced high-speed
bus (AHB), peripheral DMA controller and 160 Kbytes of on-chip SRAM. It offers seamless migration to
AT91CAP7 customizable MCUs for ARM7-plus-FPGA designs. It includes on-chip peripherals such as
USB 2.0 full speed device, SPI master and slave, two USARTs, three 16-bit timer counters, an 8-channel/
10-bit analog to digital converter, plus a full-functioned system controller including interrupt and power
control and supervisory functions.
The FPGA interface on the AT91CAP7E provides the FPGA with direct access to the AT91CAP7E’s
on-chip AHB and peripheral DMA controller. This architecture eliminates FPGA-induced bus contention,
off-loads MCU-to-FPGA communications from the CPU, and frees up the external bus interface for
external memory access.
Interfacing an ARM7-based MCU to an FPGA has traditionally been done through the external bus
interface (EBI) or programmable I/O. Either arrangement requires that the CPU transfer data to and from
the FPGA one word-at-a-time, basically stealing CPU cycles that should be conserved for processing and
limiting access to external memory during FPGA operations.
The FPGA interface on Atmel’s AT91CAP7E provides the FPGA with two AHB masters, four AHB slaves,
a special direct AHB slave interface to an external RAM through the FPGA, and a programmable ROM
that remaps the external RAM to emulate and debug the ROM code. Fourteen advanced peripheral bus
(APB) slaves, two full-duplex DMA channels and 32-bit programmable I/O may be hardware selected to
share I/O. An on-chip priority interrupt controller provides up to 13 encoded interrupts and two additional
un-encoded interrupts for DMA transfers.
CAP
TM
CUSTOMIZABLE MICROCONTROLLERS
AT91CAP7E
System Controller
Two-Wire Interface
USART
Serial Peripheral
Interface
CAN Controller
Synchronous Serial
Controller
Multi-Channel ADC
PWM Controller
Timer/Counter
Multimedia Card
Interface
AC97 Controller
ARM926EJ-S
Processor
External Bus Interface
USB Host
USB HS Device
10/100 Ethernet
MAC
LCD Controller
Image Sensor
Interface
Metal Programmable
Block
(250K or 500K Gates)
Multi-Layer
AHB Matrix
ROM
(32KB)
SRAM
(32KB)
Peripheral
Bridge
Multi-Channel
Peripheral DMA
APB
AT91CAP9
NAND Flash
SDRAM/DDRAM
Burst Cellular
RAM
Static RAM
Trans
ceiver
Trans
ceiver
8xRAM
(512x72bit)
12xDPR
(512x36bit)
Instr
Cache
(16KB)
Data
Cache
(16KB)
APB
System Controller
ICE
ARM7TDMI
PIT
Main
OSC
PLL
PMC
WDT
PLL
6 -layer AHB Matrix
JTAG
AIC
USART
ADC
Timer
x3
USART
PIO
x32
SRAM
96KB
FPGA Interface
EBI
Static Mem.
CF
NAND Flash
SDRAM
ROM (256KB)
SPI
RTT
SHWDC
GPBREG
POR
32K OSC
RC OSC
USB
FS
Device
SRAM
64KB
POR
AT91CAP7E
Peripheral DMA
Controller
AMBA Bridge