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SAM L10 and SAM L11 Microcontrollers (MCUs)

Ultra Low-Power SAM L10 and SAM L11 Microcontrollers

With the increasing growth of Internet of Things (IoT) end points and, consequently, the increased frequency of security breaches, designers are looking for MCUs that can help reduce power consumption while adding robust security. The SAM L10 and SAM L11 families of MCUs take an innovative approach to solving these challenges by integrating a wide variety of peripherals, including security features, into the industry's lowest-power MCUs in their class. This allows you to develop secured applications without the battery constraints of less power-efficient MCUs. These MCUs run at 32 MHz with memory configuration of up to 64 KB Flash and 16 KB SRAM. They come in three variant options, SAM L10, SAM L11 and SAM L11-KPH, and boast ultra-low power consumption as well as an enhanced Peripheral Touch Controller and advanced analog features. Both families of MCUs come in 24- and 32-pin package options and are targeted for use in IoT and security, low-power, capacitive touch and general-purpose embedded control applications.

The SAM L11 and SAM L11-KPH add integrated hardware security. The SAM L11-KPH adds a factory-provisioned root of trust key to provide the MCU with a secure identity that can be used for developing secure IoT applications. The SAM L11 and SAML11-KPH MCUs are supported by a comprehensive security ecosystem that includes Trustonic’s Kinibi-M™ solution and Secure Thingz’ Secure Deploy™ architecture.

SAM L11 MCUs are PSA Certified™ Level 1, which assures that the best embedded security practices have been implemented for IoT products.

Start Your New Design With Improved, Enhanced and Lower-Cost PIC32C MCUs

Did you know that PIC32C MCUs, powered by Arm Cortex cores, offer enhanced features and other benefits at up to 60% lower prices than comparable SAM MCUs? They deliver the performance and functionality to meet the requirements of a vast array of embedded designs,

Explore PIC32C MCUs

Related Devices

PIC32CM Lx Family

  • Extended memory options of up to 512 KB Flash and 64 KB RAM
  • Higher performance of up to 48 MHz
  • Pin and feature compatible with SAML10/L11 MCUs
  • PIC32CM LS60 features integrated ATECC608 secure element in a single in-line package for implementing advanced security.
  • Available in 48-, 64- and 100-pin packages
Visit PIC32CM Lx Family Page

Robust Security

SAM L11 MCUs integrate hardware-based security and Arm® TrustZone® technology to help protect devices from remote attacks. To reduce your development effort and speed your time to market, they are supported by a comprehensive security solution framework that delivers an end-to-end solution, from secure key provisioning, to cloud onboarding to complete lifecycle management. IoT nodes driven by a SAM L11 provide strong resistance to remote software attacks, which increase the nodes’ reliability and avoids downtime of their critical functions. The combination of security offered by Arm TrustZone for ARMv8-M and additional hardware-enforced security will help protect your devices from cloning and intellectual property theft. The SAML11-KPH also includes an immutable identity and Kinibi-M Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for secure application development.

  • Secure boot
  • Chip-level tamper resistance on 256 Bytes of RAM
  • Arm TrustZone technology
  • True Random Number Generator (TRNG)
  • Crypto accelerators: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) and Galois/Counter Mode (GCM)
  • Key storage
  • Secure pin multiplexing
  • Secure debug
  • Active shield protection on TrustRAM to resist microprobing attacks

Industry’s Lowest Power

Create extremely power-efficient designs with the SAM L10 and SAM L11, the industry’s lowest power MCUs in their class with an EEMBC certified ULPMark™ of 410. They are built with picoPower® technology and provide flexible power saving modes. They are supported with power debugging and data visualizer tools to monitor and analyze power consumption in real time. This helps developers to rapidly optimize their system design for lower power consumption with significant improvements in battery life.

  • picoPower® technology
  • Under 25 uA/MHz active 
  • Under 100 nA Sleep
  • Fast wake up times: 1.5 μS
  • SleepWalking peripherals
  • Dual performance levels
  • Power domain gating
  • Event System
  • Power debugger and data visualizer tool support

Superior Capacitive Touch

Incorporate capacitive touch interfaces in your applications with these MCUs which feature an enhanced Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC), offering best-in-class water tolerance and high noise immunity. It is four times faster than the previous generation of PTC and provides highly-responsive and accurate touch sensing. It is supported by the QTouch Configurator and QTouch® Modular Library which make it simple to add elegant touch interfaces to your applications.

  • Enhanced PTC
  • Driven Shield Plus 
  • Parallel acquisition
  • Buttons, wheels, sliders and surfaces
  • Highly responsive and accurate
  • Ultra-low power
  • Wake-up on touch
  • IEC/EN 61000 4-6, 10V rms

SAML11-KPH MCU Is Both PSA and SESIP Certified

The SAML11-KPH with Kinibi-M v1.0 has been both PSA and SESIP certified. This product offers a scalable security solution from secure boot to cloud onboarding to complete device lifecycle management. 

View PSA Certificate
View SESIP Certificate

Comparison of SAM L10, SAM L11 and SAM L11-KPH MCUs

Key provisioning solutions are available for the SAM L11 and SAM L11-KPH series of devices.

Comparison Block Diagram SAM L10, SAM L11 and SAM L11-KPH MCUs

Robust Chip-Level Security and Arm TrustZone Technology

IoT nodes driven by a SAM L11 MCU provide strong resistance to remote software attacks and tampering, which increases the nodes’ reliability and avoids downtime of their critical functions.

Robust Chip-Level Security

SAM L11 MCUs were created with deeply embedded security during their silicon design phase. Robust security features include chip-level tamper resistance, active shield and scrambling on 256 bytes of TrustRAM, Boot ROM designed to facilitate secure boot, NIST-compliant TRNG, FIPS-compliant AES, scrambling on data Flash, and Arm TrustZone technology to enable hardware secure partition to facilitate IP protection, code isolation and protection from remote attacks. The active shield on 256 bytes of TrustRAM protects against physical attacks and resists microprobing attacks.   

Arm TrustZone Technology

The SAM L11 incorporates Arm TrustZone technology to protect against remote software attacks. It divides the MCU into trusted and non-trusted zones and provides hardware isolation to protect keys and sensitive information from non-trusted zones.

Kinibi-M: Secure Application Development Software Framework by Trustonic

SAM L11 MCUs are supported by Kinibi-M, a comprehensive security solution framework that offers an end-to-end solution, from secure key provisioning to cloud onboarding to complete device lifecycle management. It is aimed at making your applications more secure while significantly reducing your development effort and speeding your time to market.

Kinibi-M is a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that is designed to integrate all the SAM L11’s security features and provide a modular and easy-to-use secure application development environment. It covers most requirements, including supply chain protection, automatic cloud enrollment, device attestation and provenance and software isolation and IP protection.

Ready to Get Started with the SAM L11 and Kinibi-M?

Jump-start your secure application development with the SAML11 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit (DM320205) and Kinibi-M. You can also download the Trustonic IoT Developer Kit, which includes a free developer SDK pack, software, demos and documentation to help you get started with building your first secure IoT solution.

SAM L11 End-to-End Security Solution

External Provisioning/Programming Solutions with Secure Deploy

The SAM L11 family is fully integrated with Secure Thingz’ Secure Deploy architecture, which can be used to provision SAM L11 MCUs at secure external programming centers.  The Secure Deploy architecture has been designed to enhance and simplify security implementations and enable the protection of critical Intellectual Property (IP) throughout your product’s creation, manufacture and management. It features:

  • Simple management of critical IP within the development process
  • Secure key management targeted for development, manufacturing and applications
  • Elimination of over-production and counterfeiting through constrained device programming

For more information about Secure Deploy and additional resources to help you get started  with programming and provisioning the SAM L11 MCU, Please visit the Microchip SAM L11 page on the Secure Thingz website.

Learn More About External Provisioning on the SAM L11
Go to SAM L11 Page on Secure Thingz Website

Security Threats and SAM L11’s Counter-Measures

SAM L11's Counter-Measures Block Diagram

SAM L11 Security Use Cases

SAM L11- IOT Node Block Diagaram
SAM L11 MCU- Accessory Authentication Block Diagram
SAM L11 MCU- Secure Remote Keypad Block Diagram
SAM L11 MCU- Encryption Block Diagram

picoPower® Technology and Low-Power Techniques

Devices with picoPower technology, such as the SAM L10 and SAM L11 MCUs, are designed for the lowest possible power consumption from transistor design and process geometry, sleep modes, flexible clocking options, on-the-fly user selectable performance levels, event system to SleepWalking peripherals. This technology provides flexible power-saving techniques that enable the creation of designs with longer battery lives and lower total system costs.

Power-Saving Techniques Benefits
SleepWalking Ability of the peripherals to perform a task without waking up the Central Processing Unit (CPU) from the sleep mode to maintain low power for an extended period
Power Domain Gating Unused power domain can be switched off to reduce the sleep currents even further
Dual Performance Levels (PL0 and PL2) Ability to change the CPU speed on the fly to suit the application activity level. Helps strike a balance between power and performance when in active mode.
Event System Inter-peripheral communication which reduces CPU overhead and saves CPU cycles
Integrated, Low-Power Analog
(Op Amps, ADC, AC, DAC)		 Reduces BOM
Can take inputs from sensors when in sleep

Capacitive Touch: Superior Water Tolerance, Noise Immunity and Responsiveness

Add superior capacitive touch interfaces to your application with the SAM L10/11 family. These MCUs offer an enhanced Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC) with Driven Shield Plus and Parallel Acquisition allowing you to differentiate your designs with exceptional touch-based capabilities.

Driven Shield Plus

Driven Shield Plus offers best in class water tolerance and noise immunity. It enables touch for products in dew, sweat, rain and even running water. It can also be designed in to products that are IP-68 rated. It supports touch surfaces with pinch and zoom capabilities in the presence of water.

Parallel Acquisition

Parallel acquisition improves the responsiveness of the touch interface by acquiring multiple touch sensors simultaneously as opposed to the traditional way of acquiring them sequentially. This makes the PTC on SAM L10/11, four times faster than the previous generation of PTCs. It also filters out noise and significantly improves responsiveness of high button count touch interfaces.

The PTC on SAM L10/11 MCUs offers superior noise mitigation techniques and easily passed IEC/EN 61000-4-6 10V rms industry standard conducted immunity noise tests.

Rich Development Ecosystem

IDE MPLAB® X Integrated Development Environment
Microchip Studio
IAR Embedded Workbench
Arm® Keil® MDK
SEGGER Embedded Studio
Software Framework MPLAB Harmony v3
MPLAB Harmony TrustZone® Manager
Atmel START
Atmel START TrustZone Manager
Security Framework Trustonic End-to-End Solution Support
Secure Thingz Key Provisioning
SEGGER emCrypt crypto-library
Low Power Power Debugger
Data Visualizer
Touch QTouch® Configurator
QTouch Modular Library
2D Touch Surface Library

Target Applications

IoT and Security Low Power Capacitive Touch
  • Smart cities
  • Home automation
  • Industrial automation
  • Smart agriculture
  • Medical devices
  • Accessories authentication
  • Wearables
  • Gaming controls
  • Energy harvesting
  • Smart pens
  • Low power industrial
  • Sensor nodes
  • Appliances
  • Fitness trackers
  • Automotive door handles
  • Steering wheel controls
  • Key pads
  • Remote controls

Get Started

The SAM L10 and SAM L11 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kits are available to kick-start your development. These are fully supported with security, low-power and touch demos to accelerate your development so you can get to market faster.

All SAM L10/L11 MCUs are supported by MPLAB X and Microchip Studio Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), IAR Embedded Workbench, Arm Keil® MDK as well as MPLAB Harmony v3 and Atmel START, which are free tools you can use to configure peripherals and software to accelerate your development. Atmel START also supports Arm TrustZone technology to configure and deploy secure applications. A power debugger and data analyzer tool is available to monitor and analyze power consumption in real-time and fine tune the consumption numbers on the fly to meet application needs. Our QTouch® Modular Library, 2D Touch Surface Library and QTouch Configurator are also available to simplify touch development.

SAM L10 and SAM L11 Microcontrollers

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Development Tools

SAM L10 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit

SAM L10 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit

Part Number: DM320204

The SAM L10 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit is ideal for evaluating and prototyping with ultra-low-power SAM L10 Arm® Cortex®-M23 based microcontrollers (MCUs). The SAM L10 MCU features general-purpose embedded control capabilities with enhanced Peripheral Touch Controller and advanced analog.

SAM L11 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit

SAM L11 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit

Part Number: DM320205

The SAM L11 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit is ideal for evaluating and prototyping with ultra-low-power SAM L11 Arm Cortex-M23 based microcontrollers. These devices integrate robust security which includes Arm TrustZone® technology, secure boot, crypto acceleration, secure key storage and chip-level tamper detection. The SAM L11 MCU also features general-purpose embedded control capabilities with enhanced Peripheral Touch Controller and advanced analog.

Power Debugger

Power Debugger

Part Number: ATPOWERDEBUGGER

Power Debugger is a powerful development tool for debugging and programming AVR® microcontrollers using UPDI, JTAG, PDI, debugWIRE, aWire, TPI or SPI target interfaces and Arm Cortex-M based SAM microcontrollers using JTAG or SWD target interfaces.

QT7 Xplained Pro Extension Kit

QT7 Xplained Pro Extension Kit

Part Number: ATQT7-XPRO

The QT7 Xplained Pro Extension Kit is an extension board to evaluate robust, water-tolerant self-capacitance touch. The kit includes one board with self-capacitance slider and two self-capacitance buttons. It also has eight LEDs to enable button state and slider position feedback.

I/O1 Xplained Pro Extension Kit

Part Number: ATIO1-XPRO

The I/O1 Xplained Pro Extension Kit provides a light sensor, temperature sensor and microSD card. It connects to the extension headers of any Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit.

Demo Examples

Demo Name Demo Code Location
Touch Demo with SAM L10 using MPLAB Harmony v3 GitHub Page
SAM L11 TrustZone Code Examples GitHub Page
Trusted Execution Environment www.microchip.com/START
Cloud Enrollment with Kinibi-M www.trustonic.com/Kinibi-M
Ultra-Low-Power Secure LoRa® IoT Node App Note – AN2835
Low-Power Weather Station www.microchip.com/START
Low-Power SleepWalking www.microchip.com/START
Water-Tolerant Touch with QT7 Xplained Pro Extension Board www.microchip.com/START
Low-Power Keypad Touch with QT3 Xplained Pro Extension Board www.microchip.com/START

Documentation

Title
SERCOM USART on Microchip Cortex Devices (SAM and PIC32C) Download
Secure Bootloader_SAML11 Download
SAM L11 Security Reference Guide Application Note Download
Title
32-bit MCU Brochure Download
32-bit Microcontroller Collateral and Solutions Reference Guide Download
Title
SAM L10/L11 Family Data Sheet Download
Title
SAM L10/L11 Family Silicon Errata and Data Sheet Clarification Download
Title
Basic 32-Bit MCU Design and Troubleshooting Checklist Download
Title
Ultra-Low Power Techniques Tech Brief Download
Peripheral Power Consumption in Standby Mode for SAM L10/L11 Family of Devices Tech Brief Download
Dual Developer Application Development Use Case with TrustZone on SAM L11 Using MPLAB Harmony v3 Download
How to Setup MPLAB Harmony v3 Software Development Framework Download

Kinibi-M™

Secure Deploy™ Training

Application Notes

Security Training Videos

SAM L11 Trusted Execution Environment Demo

An overview of SAML11 Trusted Execution to implement secure temperature sensor while counteracting malware and physical attacks.

 

SAM L10/L11 Driven Shield Plus

SAM L10/L11 Driven Shield Plus

A quick overview of SAM L10/L11’s Enhanced Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC) implementing Driven Shield Plus feature to showcase water tolerant touch.

SAM L11 Security Features

SAM L11 Security Features

A quick overview of SAML11 security features, use cases, comprehensive security solution framework and demos to make implementation of security simple.