A second firm has started up to exploit the 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 processor.
Oslo-based Energy Micro follows Texan firm Luminary Micro, with the Norwegian company promising low power designs: planning to introduce its first "ultra low-power" microcontroller family, dubbed EnergetIC, in the second quarter of 2009.
"Energy Micro's mission is to make the world's most energy friendly microcontrollers and ultra-low energy and power consumption is the natural number one priority for us." CEO Geir Førre told Electronics Weekly. "Our target energy and power consumption is well below any existing 32-bit solutions today. In fact the level we target for a 32bit solutions is in the range of the best available for today's 8-bit solutions."
Førre will not reveal target figures, nor the semiconductor process that will achieve them. He did say: "We will use many techniques to reduce power consumption. Some of them are commonly known, some of them are new and unique."
In addition to Luminary Micro making a range of M3 microcontrollers, NXP, TI and Toshiba are also using the core in controllers.
Is there room for another vendor?
"When we selected the core architecture it was a very important criteria for us to use an architecture that is supported by several MCU vendors," said Førre. "Software development constitutes a larger and larger portion of the development cost for a new electronic product. Therefore, more and more system developers prefer MCU architectures that can be supported by multiple providers which can enable them to reuse code from project to project and from MCU provider to MCU provider. Energy Micro will differentiate from the other Cortex-M3 providers by offering far better power consumption than the others."
Energy has also licensed various blocks from the ARM Artisan physical intellectual property (IP) family, plus a number of ARM PrimeCell peripheral IP blocks.
Førre, who is also president of Energy Micro, co-founded fabless low-power RF chip firm Chipcon, where he was CEO, which was acquired by Texas Instruments in January 2006 for $200m. Energy CTO Øyvind Janbu was one of Chipcon's early employees.
This week also saw ARM revealing an upgrade to the M3 core at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Jose.
"The latest release includes a Wake-Up Interrupt (WIC) controller which allows almost instantaneous return to fully active mode from an ultra-low leakage retention state, and introduces enhanced power management features that address the ongoing need in the embedded market for increased performance and longer battery life," said ARM. "Additional enhancements include the ability to integrate solutions for safety-critical and fault-robust applications in industrial, medical, and automotive applications."
Another M3-related announcement at ESC was from Luminary Micro which has added 30 more microcontrollers based on the core to its already broad Stellaris family.
These include "the first integration of USB OTG (On-the-Go) and Host capability in the ARM Cortex-M3 architecture", said Luminary. "Each of the new Stellaris family members ships with the Stellaris Peripheral Driver Library and bootloader pre-programmed in ROM, and each integrates the PrimeCell 32-channel configurable µDMA controller."
There is also an improved motor control block which now has up to eight full motion control PWM channels in four pairs, and up to four fault-condition handling inputs "to quickly provide low-latency shutdown and prevent damage to the motor being controlled".
The bootloader adds in-system firmware updates through the UART, I2C, and SSI interfaces, as well as loading applications.
"Features normally only available in high-end application processors, such as advanced scatter/gather transfer modes" are available through the µDMA controller.
See also: Electronics Weekly's focus on microprocessors, a roundup of content on microprocessor technologies and developments not related to the x86 architecture (from ARM, Texas Instruments and MIPS).