The benchmark, created to assist embedded designers in selecting the lowest power MCU, standardises a typical low power design workload and measures the actual energy required to complete that workload.This approach normalises the many different behaviours of MCU operation such as active current, sleep current, wake-up time, core efficiency, and cache efficiency. It then synthesises this data into a single value: the amount of energy required to complete a specific application.
Keith Odland, senior director of marketing at Ambiq Micro, said: “This is great news for developers of battery-powered wearables and other energy-sensitive IoT devices. It’s the kind of leap in performance that’s going to make the creation of completely new consumer products possible by more than doubling battery life or enabling more features to be added without increasing the power budget.”
Ambiq’s patented Subthreshold Power Optimised Technology (SPOT) platform is said to enable the Apollo MCU to achieve its best-in-class power consumption in both active- and sleep-mode. The MCU consumes 34µA/MHz executing instructions from Flash and sleep-mode currents can be as low as 140nA.
The Apollo MCU is based on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 processor with floating point unit. It is said to run at up to 24MHz and integrates ultra-low power memory, up to 512kByte Flash and 64kByte RAM. The MCU features I2C/SPI master and slave ports, and a UART for communicating with peripherals and legacy devices.
