Re:Microsoft Surface Pro Teardown
by dan1234 on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @05:40PM
(#5216189)
If you're refererring to the Atmel UC256l3U, it's in the same area as other touchscreen components so it could be something to do with them, possibly providing some glue between them and the main processor.
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I would agree. The Atmel multitouch system seems to involve the other 4 chips in that zone, so this processor is probably working with the output and doing some of the work that a kernel driver would normally do (dejiiter, smoothing, track ID matching) before presenting it to the host.
I would (also) agree.
A quick look at the handy product page that iFixit linked to (http://www.atmel.com/devices/atuc256l3u.aspx) shows that the controller has "25 touch channels", as well as supporting Atmel's "QTouch Acquisition" in hardware.
As microcontrollers go, it's pretty beefy and would have made a decent computer all by itself not too many years ago. It's a 32-bit CPU running at 50 MHz, sporting 256 KB of flash memory and 32 KB of SRAM. Granted, it's a bit low on memory for a general-purpose computer. Maybe 20 years ago, then. :)
It sure has a lot of I/O and other nice peripherals, though.