Ultra Low Power MCU from E-peas Semiconductor

E-peas Semiconductor has launched an Ultra Low Power MCU, their first MCU product, EDMS105N. They are already a world leader in energy harvesting PMIC chips.

EDMS105N has a lot of features which makes ultra low power embedded system design easy without adding much of external circuitry.

They are claiming their MCU is the lowest power consuming Cortex-M0 MCU in the world but their is a catch. Ambiq Micro has a lot of MCUs (Cortex-M4F based and Apollo 4 has 4uA/Mhz power consumption) which are less power consuming and has BLE also.

EDMS105N ‘s advantage would be its inbuilt power management, a big advantage for several applications.

I got an opportunity to chat with the CEO of E-peas Semiconductor and he mentioned this:

We consider low power consumption as a combination of dynamic power consumption and static power consumption (in our case 340nA with RTC active and 8kB RAM retention, much worse with Ambiq processors that are targeting always-on wearable products). This combination allows us to reach the highest score ever reached by a Cortex-M0 microcontroller on the ULPMark.

Features

• Ultra Low Power ARM Cortex-M0 Core (24Mhz)
• Operating Voltage: 1.8V to 3.3V DC
• Active current (CoreMark): 18μA/MHz
• Deep sleep current (RTC + 8 kB SRAM retention): 340 nA
• 1 MHz LP mode for instantaneous power reduction
• 256KB Flash, 32KB SRAM
• Various clock sources (RC: 24Mhz, 1Mhz, 32Mhz), external crystal: 32Mhz, 32.768Khz
• Two inbuilt Buck converters, two LDOs
• Communication Interfaces
  • 2x UART
  • 2x SPI
  • 2x I2C
  • 2x I2S
• 48x GPIOs (I think it is not correct as the chip package is QFN48)
• RTC, 4x Timers
• 12-bit ADC with 8 channels, up to 500 kS/s,
• Analog Comparator
• Inbuilt security block is also there which has AES and TRNG.
• Standard Debug Interface
• Package: QFN48

You can download product brief from their website.

This low power MCU could be used in various application from wearables to low power always on sensor, to battery-less devices.

There is no information available about the availability of the MCU. I think we need to send them email and on case to case basis they will provide some early samples until the MCU is widely available on online distributors like Mouser.

Cost information is also not known as of now. I will update it here as soon as I get more information about its availability and indicative cost.

You can contact E-peas Semiconductor for more details.

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