Atmel Collaborates With IHR To Drive Innovation In Automotive Electronics

Atmel® Corporation ATML, a leader in microcontroller (MCU) and touch technology solutions, today announced a collaboration with IHR, a worldwide partner in the automotive industry, to further support the innovation of Local Interconnect Network (LIN) systems. This collaboration leverages IHR's LIN configuration tools with Atmel's industry-leading embedded solutions to improve application integration, time-to-market and to minimize licensing costs. Atmel's collaboration with IHR enables Atmel to provide manufacturers with a LIN-compliant evaluation environment to further streamline development, bringing the best of automotive engineering faster to market. IHR's solutions support several Atmel technologies including the megaAVR®, tinyAVR® and XMega® AVR® families. A free demo version of the LIN drivers is available for download from the IHR website and can be used for evaluation purposes. Upcoming new product series will be supported by IHR solutions as well. Atmel combines a unique blend of IVN products and embedded MCUs. Atmel's AVR MCUs deliver the power, performance and flexibility to support a wide range of automotive applications. These small, yet powerful, advanced 8- and 32-bit AVR MCUs deliver the technical features, advanced architecture and dependable design ideal for an array of applications. Atmel's LIN product portfolio, the industry's largest, includes stand-alone transceivers, system basis chips (SBC) which integrate a transceiver, a voltage regulator and often other functions as well as Atmel AVR® MCU-based system-in-package (SiP) and application-specific (ASSP) devices. "With nearly 30 years of experience working with the automotive industry, Atmel has spurred the pervasive growth of electronic features in cars," said Giovanni Fontana, automotive applications director at Atmel. "Our collaboration with IHR will help our customers continue to build innovative electronic products in a cost-effective manner with improved integration and intuitive configuration capabilities." "IHR is recognized for our proven LIN tools used by designers to create applications that automotive manufactures rely on as competitive differentiators," said Rüdiger Kewitz, COO at IHR GmbH. "Together with Atmel, we offer a very compelling proposition for manufacturers to not only design next-generation embedded systems, but also to bring high-end applications to market through an amplitude of makes and models."