The AT91SAM9263 microcontroller-based system-on-chip embeds a 200 MIPS ARM926EJ-S-based processor. Its parallel bus architecture incorporating distributed DMA overcomes the bottlenecks that occur with conventional ARM9-based MCUs in graphically-interfaced, data-intensive applications such as networked medical monitoring equipment and GPS navigation systems. The AT91SAM9263 employs 27 DMA channels including Atmel’s 20-channel peripheral DMA controller (PDC), a 9-layer bus matrix, and two additional busses for data- and instruction-tightly-coupled-memories (TCMs) to boost CPU performance and provide on-chip data transfer rates of up to 41.6 Gbps. Two external bus interfaces (EBIs) support gigabyte-plus external memories.

On-chip human interface peripherals include a camera interface, TFT/STN LCD controller, a 6-channel audio front-end interface (AC97), I2S and a 2D graphics co-processor that off-loads line draw, block transfer, polygon fill, and clipping functions from the CPU. Networking peripherals include a 12 Mbps USB host and device, a 10/100 Ethernet MAC and a 1 Mbps control area network (CAN). There are also four USARTs, two 50 Mbps serial peripheral interfaces (SPI), CompactFlash, SDIO (MCI) and a two-wire interface (TWI) which can be connected to external wired and wireless communication modules like GPRS modem and Wi-Fi.

The AT91SAM9263 has two external bus interfaces (EBI): one for the system memory and one for the human interface. The second EBI eliminates the need for the LCD controller and CPU to share memory and can increase available CPU MIPS by 20% to 40%.

The AT91SAM9263 is supported by the AT91SAM9263 Evaluation Board and extensive third-party application development tools. It supports both Linux and Windows CE. It has been developed for advanced system-on-chip applications such as GPS application processors that require both high computing performance and high data throughputs.