Atmosic Shows Off New ATM33 Chips with Energy Harvesting, "CPU-less Operations," and Bluetooth 5.3
Claimed to offer a "3-5x" increase in battery life over competing designs, these chips boast an update to the Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy spec.
Energy harvesting wireless system-on-chip (SoC) specialist Atmosic has unveiled its latest-generation parts, the ATM33 Series, boasting Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy connectivity and Arm Cortex-M33F processors — claiming it can offer up to five times the battery life of its competitors.
"Building upon our proven ultra-low-power radio technology and market success, we are enhancing the SoCs with the processing power of the Arm Cortex-M33F, embedded non-volatile memory, as well as the latest Bluetooth standard," says David Su, Atmosic's chief executive, of his company's latest designs. "With the launch of our new product family, Atmosic is supporting the strong growing demand for more environmentally friendly solutions to reduce the billions of batteries that are disposed of every year."
The ATM33 SoCs offer a single power-optimized Arm Cortex-M33F processor core running at up to 64MHz with 128kB of RAM, 512kB of non-volatile storage, and 64kB of ROM and with support for Arm's TrustZone security platform. Compared to the company's previous-generation equivalents, the new models are claimed to offer boosted energy harvesting efficiency with a wider input range, a lower cold-start voltage, and support for lithium-ion batteries.
The new parts also offer low-power on-board voice processing capabilities, but it's the company's claims for "CPU-less operations," which are likely to be of the most interest. In this mode, Atmosic explains, the chips can use the Atmosic Sensor Hub to perform functions including memory access and beacon transmission without waking the CPU from deep sleep modes.
On the radio side, all models include Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) compliant radios with 125kbps, 500kbps, 1Mbps, and 2Mbps operation rates, angle-of-arrival (AoA) and angle-of-departure (AoD) direction finding. The energy harvesting functionality, meanwhile, is exclusive to parts with an "e" suffix and supports photovoltaic, thermal, motion, and other sources through an external interface.
More information on the new chips is available on the Atmosic website, alongside two evaluation kits — though none are yet available to purchase, with the company pledging to begin sampling in the first quarter of this year.