Analysis of Ambiq ultra-low power MCU-EEWORLD

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Ambiq is a startup that has been getting a lot of attention.

I recently spoke with Dan Cermak, VP of Architecture and Product Planning at Ambiq. They make a product that may not sound like much to the Intels and microchips of this world, but for a small company in a very competitive field, it’s pretty impressive.

The foundation of Ambiq's success is the company's patented subthreshold power optimization technology, or SPOT for short. You have to remember that I come from the days of the Texas Instruments (TI) SN7400 series transistor-transistor logic (TTL) devices, whose outputs switched between 0V and 5V, which is exactly the way the creator of the universe wanted it to be. When the first microprocessor units (MPUs) appeared, their cores and general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs) all ran at 5V.

Later, this was reduced to 3.5V or 3.3V. Personally, I find MPUs and MCUs whose GPIOs switch between 0V and 3.3V a little disturbing. The next goal is to keep the GPIO at 3.3V (or whatever signaling standard the device in question uses), but reduce the voltage for the core logic where all the digital crunching and decision making happens.

In fact, the core voltage of many devices has been decreasing over the years, starting at 2.9V and then going lower and lower, down to 0.9V or 0.8V in some extreme cases, although 1.2V is the direction that many players are optimistic about.

Then there's Ambiq, whose processor is based on their SPOT and has a core voltage of just 0.3V.

Can you tell the difference?

Ambiq's folks proudly state that the company holds more than 50 patents in this area. And because dynamic (switching) power consumed in silicon is the square of the voltage, this means that an MPU or MCU core implemented using the SPOT architecture consumes only one-sixteenth the dynamic power of an equivalent core running at 1.2V.

Since I'm interested in technology, this is how I think of SPOT. However, in reality, SPOT is also a platform for designing ultra-low-power system-on-chip (SoC) devices.

SPOT is a SoC design platform

Looking at the bottom first, conceptually they have power optimized SPOT architectures for analog, digital, RF/wireless, memory, etc. ("etc." means I have no idea what the "production technology" item in this illustration refers to).

On top of the hardware, they have the first layer of software in the form of the AmbiqSuite Software Development Kit (SDK). This includes the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), device drivers, and sample applications to accelerate understanding of the Ambiq MCU's operation. (Third-party software including the ARM/PacketCraft Cordio BLE Host Stack and FreeRTOS v10.1.1 is distributed along with debugging tools and other support.)

In addition to user-defined applications, the folks at Ambiq offer a range of solutions. For example, BlueSPOT is Ambiq’s ultra-low-power Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. SecureSPOT supports strong security features such as secure boot, secure key management, secure over-the-air (OTA) patching and updates, anti-rollback, and more. TurboSPOT is Ambiq’s ultra-low-power dynamic performance expansion technology that enables higher frequency CPU and memory operating modes. Voice-on-SPOT (VOS) is a complete, always-on, always-listening, voice-to-cloud solution for local voice commands and/or voice assistant integration into battery-powered IoT endpoint devices.

The first members of Ambiq’s fourth-generation Apollo MCU family were launched in 2020. Based on the high-performance 32-bit Arm-Cortex M4F core implemented in Ambiq SPOT, Apollo4 runs at frequencies up to 192 MHz and has dynamic power consumption as low as 4µA/MHz, significantly extending the battery life of mobile and wearable devices.

The Apollo4 family offers an end-to-end audio subsystem, optimizes graphics capabilities for wearables with rich displays, provides flexible peripherals (for sensors, GPS location services, etc.), has powerful built-in security features and hardware crypto accelerators, and the list goes on.

A few weeks ago, Ambiq introduced the latest member of the Apollo4 family - the Apollo4 Plus - which offers enhanced graphics and more powerful voice capabilities and can be used as an application processor (AP) or as a co-processor for battery-powered endpoint devices. The Apollo4 Plus is now in mass production and is targeted at smart watches and smart bands, consumer medical devices, sports and tracking units, and the 21st century smart home.

Because Ambiq also released the Apollo4 Blue Plus, which enhances the features and functionality of the Apollo4 Plus with embedded BLE 5.1 for Bluetooth connectivity with smartphones or other devices.

On their website, Ambiq states that they are “committed to further improving quality of life by enabling endpoint intelligence while further reducing carbon footprint.” That’s an awesome goal, and one they’re able to achieve with the latest and greatest member of the Apollo4 family.

About Ambiq Micro

Ambiq Micro is a world-leading IoT chip design company and a high-tech startup focused on developing ultra-low power chip products. It has the world's lowest power consumption SPOT chip technology. This technology was discovered by physicists in the last century and was studied in depth at the University of Michigan. After six years of development, it was finally officially applied to chip products in 2010. SPOT technology redefines the meaning of ultra-low power semiconductors and establishes new standards for chips, thereby making power consumption even lower. Obviously, Ambiq Micro has become a leader in this field.

The company has two main categories of products:

The first category is the microcontroller unit (MCU) chip products with the lowest power consumption. This type of product uses the Cortex-M4 core, contains floating-point operations, has Sensor Hub management capabilities, and has a built-in +/-2°C temperature sensor. At the same time, the product also has a 64-pin 4.5 x 4.5mmBGA package with 50 GPIOs, and a 41-pin 2.49 x 2.90mmCSP package with 27 GPIOs with further optimized size. This type of low-power microcontroller unit chip product is mainly suitable for low-power and small-volume application scenarios such as wearable devices, mobile devices, sensor hubs, medical and health devices, and instruments.

The second category is the world's lowest power clock chip (RTC) products. Using such products can simplify the circuits of chip manufacturers, using smaller and cheaper button batteries to meet operating needs (SR512 button batteries can be used for 30 years), and also save the cost of reset chips and electrically erasable programmable read-write memory (EEPROM). In addition to being suitable for wearable devices, mobile devices and instruments, such low-power clock chip products can also be used in trackers and wireless radio frequency identification devices.

Keywords：MCU Reference address：Analysis of Ambiq ultra-low power MCU

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