Wearables solution cuts power consumption in half
1 min read
Seven months after announcing their Newton platform, Chinese fabless semiconductor company Ingenic is following up with Newton2; a MIPS based solution aimed at lowering the power consumption and area size of next generation wearables.
The hardware module measures 15 x 30mm – 50% smaller than its predecessor. It packs an Ingenic M200 dual core XBurst processor, eMCP memory, smart power management controller, on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity and a MEMS sensor, together with seven dedicated connectors for the usual interfaces (display, audio, camera etc.)
Battery life has also been improved significantly (standby power consumption for Newton2 is less than 3mW, allowing devices to work for twice as long).
Target applications include smart watches, augmented reality headsets, smart glasses, wearable healthcare monitors, fitness bands, sleep sensors, activity trackers and smart clothing.
The board runs the latest version of the Android and Linux operating systems. A MIPS CPU clocked at 1.2GHz tackles most of the heavy lifting, while less demanding tasks are handled by a secondary low power 300MHz MIPS CPU.
When in full operating mode, the M200 chip consumes only 150mW. Ingenic's engineers were able to achieve this performance by redesigning all of the key modules inside the SoC to target ultra low power operation.
Additionally, the M200 integrates special fabric that creates multiple low power modes of operation and distinct power islands. These islands can also be switched on by special programmable triggers (e.g. voice activation).
Finally, the chipset also includes an ISP for image pre-processing that supports a range of features for camera vision applications.
