It may not be the best known microcontroller (MCU) brand, but an Ambiq Micro MCU has broken a record for low power consumption.
The company’s Apollo device recently broke the EEMBC ULPBench record, and handsomely too: it outscored the next best by more than a factor of 2, achieving a score of 377.
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 developers truly care about – the amount of energy required to complete their specific application.
The Apollo MCU is based on a high-performance, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 processor with floating point unit. It runs at up to 24 MHz and integrates ultra-low power memory, up to 512 KB Flash and 64 KB RAM. The microcontroller comes with a rich set of timing peripherals, I2C/SPI master and slave ports, and a UART for communicating with peripherals and legacy devices.
What really sets it apart in the energy consumption stakes, though, is Ambiq’s patented Subthreshold Power Optimised Technology (SPOT) platform, which enables the Apollo MCU to achieve its best-in-class power consumption in both active mode and sleep mode. It consumes a meagre 34 μA/MHz executing instructions from Flash and sleep-mode currents can be as low as 140 nA.
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