Overview
If you are building battery powered embedded product, you must learn about Ambiq Micro Apollo3 Blue.
Although, there are many MCU manufacturers who are focusing on Ultra low Power MCUs like , Nordic Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Silabs, ST Micro but Ambiq Micro provides lowest power consuming microcontrollers in the world. For example, their Apollo3 consumes 6uA per Mhz and Apollo4 consumes 4uA per Mhz.
I have been working on low power embedded systems design since 2019 and have learned a lot about how to make design which can work with couple of uA current while running.
What I have understood is, it is not that simple. You need to look at so many things if you are aiming at < 1mA average current. I have written a detailed article also sharing what I have learned, Tips for low power embedded systems design.
In this article, I have explained how to setup the development environment and shared details on how to use various interfaces.
Unfortunately, Ambiq Micro has not created knowledge base articles on their website so it will be difficult for a new user to work with their MCUs. Their technical forum is also quite unresponsive.
But, I am very impressed with the MCU technology they have created so inspite of these technical hurdles I wanted to learn how to build products using Ambiq Micro MCUs.
From hardware point of view they have done a good job, they have released the hardware design files of their Evaluation boards, helps a lot and resolve most questions about the hardware.
As the design files are in Altium, it is an added advantage for engineers who are using Altium, like me🙂
They are lacking on SDK front. For Apollo3 MCU, there is no HAL documentation ( very bad) and the absence of simpler example code makes life of a new developer quite difficult.
I think may be they are just focusing on helping their old customers who are using their Apollo, Apollo 2 MCUs or they are only interested if project has very high volumes.
As of now, smaller companies need to go through their distributors or they need help themselves (struggle on your own) with whatever information is available on their website.
I thought, I can share whatever I will have learned so far so that other engineers do not need to struggle that much, hopefully 🙂.
Resources on Ambiq Micro website
- Apollo3 Blue Product Page
- Apollo3 Blue Datasheet
- Apollo3 Evaluation Board Hardware Design files
- SDK
- Apollo3 Blue Pinout Details
I work as an embedded systems design consultant, helping companies build custom embedded products and develop test automation solutions for their PCBs.
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