Sharp and component distributor Arrow have teamed up to produce a low-power display/keyboard/processor/sensor reference design and demo board for portable products.
Called Oryx, it runs on 26mW and includes hardware common to many handheld devices, plus advanced features like wake-on-shake.
Adopters are left to add their own application code and proprietary hardware, and do the production engineering.
"Regardless of whether it is portable devices in the medical or industrial sector, sport and fitness computers, point-of-sale terminals, toys or remote controls," said Sharp, "such devices have similar basic functions: a display, sensors, CPU, RTC [real-time clock], memories and input interface; and users expect them to last as long as possible between battery change or charge."
Components come from Sharp, NXP, Analogue Devices and Linear Technology amongst others.
The display is probably the most unusual part: an example of Sharp's 'memory LCD' which saves power by doing away with refresh scanning.
Instead it has a bit store built into each pixel.
This particular one is the 34mm 96x96 LS013B4DN04, which consumes 2µA holding a static image, and 4µA when refreshed once a second.
The processor is an ARM Cortex M0 variant.
"The main power consumer is the NXP LPC11U14 microcontroller which, clocking its M0 kernel at 50MHz, requires 8mA," said Sharp.
Next in power comes the NXP temperature sensor, needing 300µA max (100µA typical, 200pA stand-by), followed by the 200µA RTC.
Throttling back the processor clock to 12MHz drops system power to 2.4mA.
With the display off and only basic CPU functions enabled there is a 366µA sleep mode, followed by a 2.3µA deep power down mode.
"In order to awaken from the deep sleep, the reference design contains an accelerator sensor which signals to the CPU to start operating as soon as the device is moved," said Sharp "This is useful for remote controls which are left lying around for long periods of time."
Sharp also makes small solar cells that deliver 1mW from room lighting - and 300mW in sunlight - "enough to charge a lithium ion battery or a super capacitor in deep power-down mode which supplies the application in operation, guaranteeing readiness without using an external charger".
Other power figures are:
Analogue Devices ADXL345 accelerometer: 100nA stand-by.
Numonyx SPI-NOR 4Mbit flash: 20µA stand-by, 1.5µA deep power-down.
NXP PCF8885 multi-channel touch chip: 10µA active, 0.1µA sleep.