Neobase is turning the concept of a social media upside down, shifting the balance of ownership, control and security back to users.
It’s nearly impossible to envision a time when social media didn’t exist. From how we receive our news to how we engage with friends and family, sites like Facebook and Twitter have truly revolutionized the way in which we interact with the world around us. Given our modern-day state of interconnectivity, it seems like just about everything we see, do and feel is shared online. However, as recent breaches have made apparent, do we truly know who has access to all of that content? Fortunately, the Neone crew has designed a solution that hopes to rid this problem.
Billed as the world’s first private network device, Neobase is an encrypted, cylindrical gadget that allows owners to create an online community that only they control. Sharing with friends and family is seamless as users decide exactly what to share and who to share it with. And unlike many services before, the unit doesn’t rely on the cloud. Instead, all posts, comments, links, photos and files shared are stored on a user’s Neobase. This keeps information protected as it never has to pass through a website, a third party vendor or the cloud — and theoretically, cuts out the middlemen. What’s more, an Atmel ATSHA204 crypto engine plays an integral role in establishing its secure architecture.
“This means that no one — not even us here at Neone — can know anything about you, your activities or what you share. Neone doesn’t host or operate your social network. You do,” the team writes.
Neobase’s plug-and-play functionality makes it easy to install and even easier to use. To get started, owners simply connect the device to their in-home network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet and begin assigning up to five family and friends as additional users. You can even connect with other Neobase users in the Neone Network if you choose.
As posts are created, users can pick and choose specific friends from their network that will be able to see the content and any links, photos and files associated with it. Neobase then syncs directly to the other Neobase units that information is being shared with, and only relays the specific content that has been selected.
Beyond that, the folks at Neone have developed the device so that, no matter where a user is located and how they are connected while on-the-go, the Neobase mobile app uses a fully-encrypted connection that links directly to their respective Neobase. Once again, no cloud required.
“The decentralized, peer-to-peer architecture of the Neone Network is a fundamental change in how your activities and information are stored and shared on the Internet, making it the heart of the Neobase’s security and privacy,” the team adds. “We’ve added additional security technology and encryption throughout the Neobase. Your computer or mobile device uses a secure SSH tunnel to connect to your Neobase and the Neone Network, which is much more secure than a browser with SSL.”
Given its sleek, polished white design and compact size (6″ tall with a diameter of 3.5” and weighs only 15 ounces), Neobase will be a welcomed, aesthetically-pleasing addition to any living room, office or dorm room. The device itself offers one Terabyte of storage and a USB port for expanding storage. The drive runs a customized version of Linux to support its social networking functions.
Sound like something you and your family would like to have? Neobase is currently live on Kickstarter, where its team is seeking $100,000. If all goes to plan, shipment is expected to begin by August 2015.
This CNC machine will let Makers carve the way they want.
For a couple of years, Inventables has been the CNC device of choice for Makers with their open-source, easily-modded Shapeoko 2. And while multi-axis, computerized milling machines are nothing new, the Chicago-based company continues to cater to the burgeoning DIY community with the launch of a new device. DubbedX-Carve, the machine not only packs several upgrades from its older siblings but is entirely scalable as well.
You may recall the Shapeoko family from way back in 2011 when the concept CNC machine kit first made its Kickstarter debut. There, it well exceeded its initial goal having garnered over $11,000. This design would go on to inspire the market-ready Shapeoko 2 in 2012.
With X-Carve, Inventables brings a number of innovative elements to the CNC kit concept. Essentially, it features all the upgrades you wished the Shapeoko had, including stronger corner-mounting for increased rigidity, NEMA 23 motors and self-tapping screws. Beyond that, the latest machine uses 50% fewer parts and requires just half the build time.
“With a relentless focus on reducing the part count and improving rigidity, we designed single-piece extrusions for X‑Carve’s gantry and spindle mount. New Y-axis plates bring the spindle closer to the center, decreasing flex,” the team writes.
The kit comes in two size options — standard and large with 500mm and 1000mm rails, respectively. The workable space is about 12” x 12″x 2.7″ for the standard and 31″ x 31” x 2.7″ for the large. Inventables says the latter is even big enough to work on a full-sized longboard. What’s more, X-Carve can even be configured to any size, as long as it falls within the standard and large spectrum.
The X-Carve is also capable of creating precision parts from a wide range of materials including plastic, wood, metal, foam, cardboard and wax. Created for a workshop (and the occasional Makerspace) setting, the unit is both customizable and expandable. In other words, if a Maker already has one of Inventables previous machines, they can upgrade and scale their existing device by simply adding a few X-Carve components.
On the electronics side, the X-Carve boasts a 24VDC spindle with a single source power supply for its motor and spindle. This gives users spindle control through Gcode. The gadget is designed to be controlled using an Arduino (ATmega328) and gShield (an Arduino shield with three stepper motor drivers), but more advanced users can also leave off the controller and try their own. The open-source machine will run the Easel software along with other CAM options as well.
Interested? Good news, X-Carve will begin shipping April 30, 2015 and will begin at $799 with fully-souped up models upwards of $2,000. Like its predecessor, it comes in kit form. An upgrade kit for the Shapeoko 2 will also be available for just $200. Until then, you can head over to its official page to learn more.
With a retail price under $40, the White 800 is the perfect introduction to the world of smart lighting.
The battle for control of the burgeoning smart lighting market continues to heat up, with new products being introduced regularly by both large corporations and startups. Just this month, Philips Hue announced a pair of new solutions: the Phoenix and Go, a wireless white light lamp and a portable LED lamp, respectively. Not too far behind is Australian startup LIFX who has unveiled a new product of its own, the White 800.
The company, which was Wi-Fi-enabled lighting pioneer and one of the all-time most successful Kickstarter campaigns back in 2012 — has launched a $40 smart bulb capable of switching between both warm and cool white lights. As can be expected, the White 800 is equipped with built-in Wi-Fi technology (meaning no hub required) to allow users to control their lights, create one-touch presets and configure favorite settings, all from its accompanying mobile app.
Between the bulb’s sleek compact profile and 890 bright shining lumens (60W equivalent), the White 800 a perfect introduction into smart lighting for those looking to bring their homes into the Internet of Things era. Users can naturally wake up each morning with automatically increasing luminosity, schedule lights to turn on when upon arrival, or set the mood with a soft candle flicker.
Beyond that, owners can integrate their connected lights with IFTTT to make their own recipes pairing the lights with services such as social media, weather channels and calendars. According to LIFX, the bulb can live up to 23 years based on three hours of daily use. Those interested in installing White 800 lights in their home should head over to its official page here.
Bring this wireless lamp anywhere ‘Hue’ want to ‘Go.’
Since its inception, Philips Hue lightbulbs have allowed users to select the brightness and color of light they want for any room. Now, the company is taking that experience to a whole new level with its latest Hue device that lets users carry their chosen ambience around in a portable bowl-like light that can be controlled via smartphone.
Philips notes that the aptly named Philips Hue Go is designed to change the way in which light is used in the home. Unlike conventional fixed units, this one can be moved in and around a home, and serve as a “portable center piece” to let anyone experience the light that they want anywhere at anytime. It even has a battery life of up to three hours when left unplugged.
Go’s unique shape and thick-walled spherical body allows users to place it either on a flat surface facing down, facing up or tilted to one side.
“It can also be positioned in different ways to adapt to your needs; enhance a living space by positioning it to face a wall washing it with light, add ambience to an intimate dinner by placing it as a center piece on the table or focused on a piece of work by directing the light where you need it,” the company explains.
The Hue Go enables users to choose from more than 16 million colors and seven different lighting effects, ranging from functional warm white light to cool energizing daylight. It can be controlled via a button directly on the device itself or via the Philips Hue app on a user’s smartphone. As with other Hue gadgets, the Go can interact with more than 200 third-party apps, and features five new patented dynamic light effects to enrich those special moments and interaction.
Just like Philips Hue, the Go can discretely alert a user of an incoming email or change in weather via a gentle light notification, as well as enhance the TV viewing experience. Philips Hue Go works seamlessly with all Philips Hue and Friends of Hue products, and can be easily integrated into an existing network.
Looking for an ambient, portable lamp of your own? The $109 (€99.95) Philips Hue Go will be available this month in Europe and June in North America.
SAM L21 MCUs consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.
The Internet of Things (IoT) juggernaut has unleashed a flurry of low-power microcontrollers, and in that array of energy-efficient MCUs, one product has earned the crown jewel of being the lowest-power Cortex M-based solution with power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode.
How do we know if Atmel’s SAM L21 microcontroller can actually claim the leadership in ultra-low-power processing movement? The answer lies in the EEMBC ULPBench power benchmark that was introduced last year. It ensures a level playing field in executing the benchmark by having the MCU perform 20,000 clock cycles of active work once a second and sleep the remainder of the second.
ULPBench shows SAM L21 is lower power than any of its competitor’s M0+ class chips.
Atmel has released the ultra-low-power SAM L21 MCU it demonstrated at Electronica in Munich, Germany back in November 2014. Architectural innovations in the SAM L21 MCU family enable low-power peripherals — including timers, serial communications and capacitive touch sensing — to remain powered and running while the rest of the system is in a reduced power mode. That further reduces power consumption for always-on applications such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical and connected wearables.
Next, the 32-bit ARM-based MCU portfolio combines ultra-low-power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks. Collectively, these three features make up the basic recipe for battery-powered mobile and IoT devices for extending their battery life from years to decades. Moreover, they reduce the number of times batteries need to be changed in a plethora of IoT applications.
Low Power Leap of Faith
Atmel’s SAM L21 microcontrollers have achieved a staggering 185.8 ULPBench score, which is way ahead of runner-up TI’s SimpleLink C26xx microcontroller family that scored 143.6. The SAM L21 microcontrollers consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode. According to Atmel spokesperson, it comes down to one-third the power of competing solutions.
Markus Levy, President and Founder of EEMBC, credits Atmel’s low-power feat to its proprietary picoPower technology and the company’s low-power expertise in utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring. Atmel’s picoPower technology employs flexible clocking options and short wake-up time with multiple wake-up sources from even the deepest sleep modes.
ULPBench aims to provide developers with a reliable methodology to test MCUs.
In other words, Atmel has taken the low-power game beyond architectural improvements to the CPU while optimizing nearly every peripheral to operate in standalone mode and then use a minimum number of transistors to complete the given task. Most lower-power ARM chips simply disable the clock to various parts of the device. The SAM L21 microcontroller, on the other hand, turns off power to those chip parts; hence, there is no leakage current in thousands of transistors in that part.
Here is a brief highlight of Atmel’s low-power development efforts that now encompass almost every peripheral in an MCU device:
Sleep Modes
Sleep modes not only gate away the clock signal to stop switching consumption, but also remove the power from sub-domains to fully eliminate leakage. Atmel also employs SRAM back-biasing to reduce leakage in sleep modes.
Consider a simple application where the temperature in a room is monitored using a temperature sensor with the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In order to reduce the power consumption, the CPU would be put to sleep and wake up periodically on interrupts from a real-time counter (RTC). The measured sensor data is checked against a predefined threshold to decide on further action. If the data does not exceed the threshold, the CPU will be put back to sleep waiting for the next RTC interrupt.
SleepWalking
SleepWalking is a technology that enables peripherals to request a clock when needed to wake-up from sleep modes and perform tasks without having to power up the CPU Flash and other support systems. For instance, Atmel’s ultra-low-power capacitive touch-sensing peripheral can run in all operating modes and supports wake-up on a touch.
For the temperature monitoring application, as mentioned above, this means that the ADC’s peripheral clock will only be running when the ADC is converting. When the ADC receives the overflow event from the RTC, it will request its generic clock from the generic clock controller and peripheral clock will stop as soon as the ADC conversion is completed.
Event System
The Event System allows peripherals to communicate directly without involving the CPU and thus enables peripherals to work together to solve complex tasks using minimal gates. It allows system developers to chain events in software and use an event to trigger a peripheral without CPU involvement.
Again, taking temperature monitor as a use case, the RTC must be set to generate an overflow event, which is routed to the ADC by configuring the Event System. The ADC must be configured to start a conversion when it receives an event. By using the Event System, an RTC overflow can trigger an ADC conversion without waking up the CPU. Moreover, the ADC can be configured to generate an interrupt if the threshold is exceeded, and the interrupt will wake up the CPU.
Low Power MCU Use Case
Paul Rako has mentioned a sensor monitor in his recent post in Atmel’s Bits & Pieces blog. Rako writes in his post titled “The SAM L21 pushes the boundaries of low power MCUs” about this sensor monitor being asleep 99.99 percent of the time, waking up once a day to take a measurement and send it wirelessly to a host. Such tasks can be conveniently handled by an 8-bit device.
However, moving to IoT applications, which constitute protocol stacks, there is number crunching involved and that requires a faster ARM-class 32-bit chip. So, for battery-powered IoT applications, Rako makes the case for 32-bit ARM-based chip that can wake up, do its thing, and go back to sleep. If a high-current chip wakes up 10 times faster but uses twice the power, it will still use less energy and less charge than the slower chip.
Next, Rako presents sensor fusion hub as a case study in which the device saves power by skipping the radio chip to send the data from each sensor and instead uses the ARM-based microcontroller that does the math and pre-processing to combine the raw data from all sensors and then assembles the result as a simple chunk of data.
Atmel has scored an important design victory in the ongoing low-power game that is now prevalent in the rapidly expanding IoT market. Atmel already boasts credentials in the connectivity and security domains — the other two key IoT building blocks. Its connectivity solutions cover multiple wireless arenas — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and 6LoWPan — to enable IoT communications.
Likewise, Atmel’s CryptoAuthentication devices come with protected hardware key storage and are available with SHA256, AES128 or ECC256/283 cryptography. The IoT triumvirate of low power consumption, broad connectivity portfolio and crypto engineering puts Atmel in a strong position in the promising new market of IoT that is increasingly demanding low power portfolio of MCUs to be matched with high performance.
The new Atmel | SMART L21 is expanding battery life from years to decades.
This week, Atmel revealed the big news that the recently-unveiled Atmel | SMART SAM L family consumes just one-third the power of existing solutions already on the market. Having achieved a 185 EEMBC ULPBench score, the SAM L21 is now the world’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M based device.
Impressively, the series boasts power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode. The SAM L not only broadens the company’s current 32-bit ARM-based MCU lineup, but extends battery life from years to decades, reducing the number of times batteries need to be changed in devices such as fire alarms, wearables, medical gadgets and equipment placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks — three features that are cornerstones of most Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Sampling now, the SAM L21 comes complete with a development platform including an Xplained Pro kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.
The SAM L21 MCUs will enable designers to solve their power challenges for battery-powered IoT devices — something that has caught the attention of mainstream media outlets including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, The Register, Network World and Daily Mail, as well as industry journals like SiliconRepublic,New Electronics and EE Times.
“The number of things getting plugged into the Internet of Things has already reached the point of satire. But there’s a new, extremely low power technology that’s being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access into a whole new class of sensors, wearables, and practically disposable devices. That’s because it can run off a battery charge for over over 10 years.”
“The processor may not be enough to, say, run an Ubuntu desktop, but it’s certainly enough computing power and memory to run a real-time operating system with multiple programs, handle physical interfaces, stream media from a USB device or other external storage, and tweet you when your dishes are clean. It also can handle a lot of tasks that can reduce the power usage of other components in a device.”
“Battery life is consistently listed as a major flaw of smartphones, smartwatches and other wearables. But this problem could soon be solved thanks to technology that promises to extend battery life for ‘decades.’ Atmel has released its latest microcontrollers (MCUs) for a variety of gadgets that are so low power they can even harvest energy from a person’s body.”
“They use a third of the power of rival chips and tests have shown they are the lowest power microprocessor ever made. The microcontrollers run on the firm’s picoPower technology and Atmel’s Event System that makes different parts of the device work together to carry out tasks. By effectively ‘sharing’ energy, the whole device uses less power and, subsequently, less battery.”
“As everything around us, from phones and fridges to bicycles and trash cans, begins to connect to the Internet, there’s an increasing desire for low-power chips. Like this one, which can last for over ten years on a single battery charge. It has some other clever tricks up its sleeve. Usually in a chip like this, sleep mode sees everything but the clock function shut down, meaning it has to wake every time connected devices need to communicate; this new Atmel chip has different sleep states, allowing connected devices to communicate with each other while the chip continues to use very little power.”
“Of course, the chips don’t pack huge amounts of grunt. In fact, at best you’re looking at a 42 MHz Cortex M0+ CPU core, 256 kilobytes of Flash memory, 32 kilobytes of static RAM, and 8 kb of separate low-power static RAM. Not enough to run a desktop OS, then, but plenty to run small programs, power hardware interfaces, read and record data from sensors, tweet and the like.”
“Batteries, already the Achilles heel of mobile devices, present an even bigger challenge for even smaller devices, like wearables and the budding Internet of Things industry. These latter devices are not things that you would, or should, associate with the frequent charging and battery replacement we are used to on smartphones. How do you balance performance and battery life? Atmel, a micro-controller manufacturer based in San Jose, may have the answer. Its new ultra-low power SAM L21 32-bit ARM-based MCU (micro controller unit) is advertised to last more than a decade before needing a recharge or replacement.”
“That kind of battery life will be critical for a certain class of devices that include sensors, wearable, and smart home appliances. The SAM L21 advertises a power draw of only 35 microamps per MHz when awake and an even smaller 200 nanoamps when asleep. In comparison, current low-power MCUs already eat up to 120 to 160 microamps per MHz. The difference it definitely substantial.”
“The Internet of Things is about to reverse a lot of what we’ve wanted in a chip. Soon, we won’t need vast amounts of calculations per second — just how many instructions does it take for your fridge to send an order to your supermarket? Not that many when you compare it to something complicated that chip design has been working towards, like a Computer Aided Design drawing in 3D, for example.”
“Size is important. However, the real big issue, when it comes to a ubiquitous IoT where everything is connected, will be battery life. The reason is that we are not going to want to change the batteries within the base of a dozen bottles of water that we may have sitting around just to discover whether we’ve drank their contents or not. Even if your fridge orders fresh stock, it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“That battery has to last the life of the connected object in the IoT. And that could be 10 years away, possibly longer. Atmel reckons it has a solution. It says its new 32-bit ARM-based chips will last decades. Note the plural. Atmel says its new chips combine battery-saving low power with flash and SRAM that is big enough to run both the application and the IoT-needed wireless stacks.”
“Being a Cortex-M0+-powered chip, the SAM L21 is not particularly powerful: it tops out at 48MHz, and runs ARM Thumb (and some Thumb-2) code. But the family does pack a few features like USB interfacing, op-amps and comparators, DMA with peripherals, a random number generator, and AES cryptography in hardware, plus other bits and pieces. The idea is for each chip to sleep, wake up when something happens, make a decision on whether or not it needs to alert the wider world, and then go back to sleep.
“Constantly being in contact with its base over wired or wireless networking will drain its batteries; activating external electronics for power-hungry IP communications should only be done if its sensors detect something significant. Like an explosion or a fire.”
“Sensors and batteries – the two keys to unlocking the future of IoT. Can we make small enough sensors to garner and exchange the right data? Can we make small enough, powerful enough, batteries that don’t need recharging every few hours?These are the two questions posed for today’s inventors, and they are being answered every day. Now, Atmel’s latest creation may have brought significant IoT engagement closer to reality, with its new low-powered 32-bit SAM L controller able extend the battery life of small, low-powered intelligent devices by decades.”
“The result is a far more efficient, small controller that, if advanced upon in the right way, will open up a whole new swathe of devices for IoT innovation. It’s just a sample, prototype release so far, but once the right people get their hands on this it’s only a matter of time before it creeps into suites of low-powered devices.”
“This week TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+, a product announced last year that was scheduled to be released at about this time. It’s reasonable to expect that a formal announcement of the product’s score and availability will be made soon.”
“When it comes to applications including the Internet of Things (IoT), consumer, industrial, medical, and other battery-powered devices — e.g., fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and devices placed in rural, agriculture, offshore, and other remote areas — ultra-low-power consumption is the name of the game. MCU manufacturers are constantly competing with each other to offer the lowest power consumption possible. The latest ultra-low-power offering comes from the folks at Atmel, who have just announced their SMART SAM L21 — an ARM Cortex-M0+ based family of MCUs that boast power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode — which is said to ‘extend battery life from years to decades.’”
“The L21 goes much further than simply gating the clocks — it also gates the power, completely disconnecting the power rails from functions that are not currently in use. In the case of the smart peripherals, even when they are powered down, a small part of each peripheral keeps a ‘watchful eye’ on what’s happening in the outside world. If it sees something interesting, it can request clock and data services and — if the peripheral decides the situation justifies such an action — it can wake the main CPU… Also of interest is the CCL (custom configurable logic) block, which boasts four 3-input lookup tables (LUTs) that can implement a mix of combinatorial logic functions (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, NOT) and sequential logic functions (gates D-type flip-flop, JK-type flip-flop, gated D-type latch, RS latch). These can be connected to the event system (including the peripherals), the interrupt system, and general-purpose input/outputs; also, they can be cascaded together. This makes it possible to implement sophisticated customized “wake-up” conditions for the various functional blocks.”
Consuming one-third the power of existing solutions, Atmel | SMART SAM L achieves 185 EEMBC ULPBench score.
System design used to be an exercise in optimizing speed. That has since changed. Nowadays, embedded systems pack plenty of performance to handle a number of task, leading the challenge for designers to shift to completing those tasks using as little energy as possible — but not necessarily making it as fast as possible. As you can imagine, this has created quite the competitive environment on the processor battlefield amongst vendors, each seeking to attain the lowest power solution on the market.
“The surge in popularity of battery-powered electronics has made battery life a primary system-design consideration. In extreme cases, the desire is not to run off of a battery at all, but to harvest energy from local sources to run a system — which requires the utmost power frugality,” writes Andreas Eieland, Atmel Director of Product Marketing. “In addition, there’s a growing family of devices like smoke detectors, door locks, and industrial sensors (4-20 mA and 10-50 mA) that can draw power through their inputs, and that power is limited.”
These sort of trends point to the significance of reducing the power requirements of electronic systems. However, the varying technologies that provide the necessary performance make power reduction harder. Fortunately, Atmel has been focusing on low power consumption for more than 10 years across its portfolio of AVR and Atmel ǀ SMART ARM-based processors. Many integrated peripherals and design techniques are used to minimize power consumption in real-world applications, such as integrated hardware DMA and event system to offload the CPU in active and standby modes, switching off or reducing clock or supply on device portions not in use, intelligent SleepWalking peripherals enabling CPU to remain in deep sleep longer, fast wake-up from low power modes, low voltage operation with full functionality, as well as careful balancing of high performance and low leakage transistors in the MCU design.
With picoPower technology found in AVR and Atmel ǀ SMART MCUs, Atmel has taken it a step further. Indeed, all picoPower devices are designed from the ground up for lowest possible power consumption from transistor design and process geometry, sleep modes, flexible clocking options, to intelligent peripherals. Atmel picoPower devices can operate down to 1.62V while still maintaining all functionality, including analog functions. They have short wake-up times, with multiple wake-up sources from even the deepest sleep modes. Some elements of picoPower technology cannot be directly manipulated by the user, but they form a solid base that enables ultra-low power application development without compromising functionality. Meanwhile, flexible and powerful features and peripherals lets users apply an assortment of techniques to reduce a system’s total power consumption even further.
Then, there’s the Atmel | SMART SAM L21 microcontroller, which has broken all ultra-low power performance barriers to date. These Cortex-M0+-based MCUs can maintain system functionality, all while consuming just one-third the power of comparable products on the market today. This device delivers ultra-low power running down to 35µA/MHz in active mode, consuming less than 900nA with full 32kB RAM retention. With rapid wake-up times, Event System, Sleepwalking and the innovative picoPower peripherals, the SAM L21 is ideal for handheld and battery-operated devices for a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
The ultra-low power SAM L family not only broadens the Atmel | SMART portfolio, but extends battery life from years to decades, reducing the number of times batteries need to be changed in devices such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and equipment placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks — three features that are cornerstones of most IoT applications. Sampling now, the SAM L21 comes complete with a development platform including an Xplained Pro kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.
So how does the SAM L21 stack up against the others? Ahead of the pack, of course! As an alternative to so-called “bench marketing” of low power products, nearly ever large semiconductor company — and several smaller ones that focus on low power — have collaborated in a working group formed by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC). The EEMBC ULPBench uses standardized test measurement hardware to strictly define a benchmark code for use by vendors, considering energy efficiency and running on 8-, 16- and 32-bit architectures. At the moment, the Atmel | SMART SAM L21 product boasts the highest ULPBench score of any microcontroller, regardless of CPU.
“In Atmel’s announcement last year for the company’s SAM L21 family, I had pointed out the amazingly low current consumption ratings for both the active and sleep mode operation of this product family – now I can confirm this opinion with concrete data derived from the EEMBC ULPBench,” explained Markus Levy, EEMBC President and Founder. “Atmel achieved the lowest power of any Cortex-M based processor and MCU in the world because of its patented ultra-low power picoPower technology. These ULPBench results are remarkable, demonstrating the company’s low-power expertise utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring, as well as other innovative techniques.”
While running the EEMBC ULPBench, the SAM L21 achieves a staggering score of 185, the highest publicly-recorded score for any Cortex-M based processor or MCU in the world — and significantly higher than the 167 and 123 scores announced by other vendors. The SAM L21 family consumes less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.
In fact, a recent EE Times writeup delving deeper into competition even revealed, “TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+.”
Beyond the recently-unveiled ARM-based chip, it’s also important to note the 0.7V tinyAVR. A typical microcontroller requires at least 1.8V to operate, while the voltage of a single battery-cell typically ranges from 1.2V to 1.5V when fully charged, and then drops gradually below 1V during use, still holding a reasonable amount of charge. This means a regular MCU needs at least two battery cells. Whereas, Atmel has solved this problem by integrating a boost converter inside the ATtiny43U, converting a DC voltage to a higher level, and bridging the gap between minimum supply voltage of the MCU and the typical output voltages of a standard single cell battery. The boost converter provides the chip with a fixed supply voltage of 3.0V from a single battery cell even when the battery voltage drops down to 0.7V. This allows non-rechargeable batteries to be drained to the minimum, thereby extending the battery life. Programmable shut-off levels above the critical minimum voltage level avoid damaging the battery cell of rechargeable batteries.
EE Times highlights the ongoing game of leapfrog between MCU vendors for the lowest-power solution. Can you guess who’s winning?
Writing for EE Times, Rich Quinnell notes that MCU vendors have become engaged in a new game of leapfrog, announcing a slew of products with ever-improving benchmark results and leadership in ultra-low power processing.
“While this may seem like a marketing game, developers will ultimately be the winners as vendors refine their techniques for saving power. In the past, a low powered MCU also meant low performance, but vendors have been challenging this correlation by offering increasingly powerful MCUs for low-power applications,” he writes. “Developers, however, faced a problem in evaluating these offerings. Traditional specifications such as operating current in mW/MHz and sleep-mode leakage currents became increasingly difficult to evaluate in the face of the multiple power states that devices offered, and in the face of inconsistency in the industry in the descriptions and specifications used to characterize low-power operation.”
The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (more commonly referred to as EEMBC) develops benchmarks to help system designers select the optimal processors and understand the performance and energy characteristics of their systems. EEMBC has benchmark suites spanning across countless application areas, targeting just about everything from the cloud and big data, to mobile devices (Android phones and tablets) and digital media, to the Internet of Things and ultra-low power microcontrollers. In particular, the EEMBC ULPBench power benchmark, which was introduced last year, standardizes datasheet parameters and provides a methodology to reliably and equitably measure MCU energy efficiency.
“This is one of the strictest benchmarks we’ve ever done in terms of setup and such. The benchmark has the MCU perform 20k clock cycles of active work once a second, and sleep the remainder of the second. This way each processor performs the same workload, which levels the playing field with regard to executing the benchmark,” EEMBC President Marcus Levy told EE Times in a recent interview.
In order to calculate the final ULPMark-CP score, 1,000 is divided by the median value for average energy used per second during each of 10 benchmark cycles. A larger value therefore represents less energy consumed.
Using this benchmark, MCU vendors have begun publishing their results and surpassing one another to temporarily claim their stake at the top of the low-power leaderboard. Still, the leapfrog game is likely to continue for some time. Andreas Eieland, Atmel Director of Product Marketing explained to EE Times, “Low power is an area where everyone is pouring a lot of R&D into, and it has taken on a much faster pace than before. We know we’re the lowest power now, but you never know where your competition is in its efforts. So, we’re already looking at the next step.”
Eieland points out that at first low-power development efforts mainly concentrated on architectural improvements to the CPU, however optimizing the CPU wasn’t enough. This meant companies needed to begin going through every peripheral and optimizing it, looking at every transistor in the product. He adds, “We [Atmel] started developing clock-on-demand features, logic that allows peripherals to operate stand-alone, using the minimum circuitry needed to complete their task, gating away the clock and even establishing a variety of power domains so we could shut down circuits not in use and eliminate even their leakage current.”
“TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+, a product announced last year that was scheduled to be released at about this time,” Quinnell reveals.
The Atmel | SMART SAM L21 family delivers ultra-low power running down to 35µA/MHz in active mode, consuming less than 900nA with full 32kB RAM retention, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode. With rapid wake-up times, Event System, Sleepwalking and the innovative picoPower peripherals, the SAM L21 is ideal for handheld and battery-operated devices in a variety of markets.
As time goes on, we can surely expect to see benchmark scores continue to improve and the competition to pick up. However, despite their differences, everyone can agree that these scores are only a mere starting point for developers seeking the lowest-power device for their design.
“The ULP benchmark isn’t 100% fair; no benchmark can ever be,” Eieland concluded. “But it does take a lot of the marketing out of low power, and it gives you a relative comparison you can use.”
IC and system simulation tools are enabling a power-efficient, cost-optimized and reliable Internet of Things ecosystem.
Atmel is currently using engineering simulation solutions from ANSYS to model, analyze and optimize our broad Internet of Things (IoT) product portfolio from scalable embedded MCUs and MPUs to wireless connectivity gateways.
Power consumption, data security and communication standards compliance are critical design requirements for connected applications. Striking an optimal balance among such concerns as power efficiency, antenna integration performance, security and cost is a key design challenge faced by engineers developing devices that are paving the way for the proliferation of IoT.
The industry-leading SmartConnect WINC1500 lEEE 802.11 b/g/n IoT network controller SoC along with the latest family of Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-M0+ MCUs deliver extreme low-power, compact size and comprehensive connectivity. The Atmel design team leveraged ANSYS HFSS, ANSYS RedHawk and ANSYS Totemto design and validate these complex SoCs and platforms used across multiple IoT application segments. ANSYS simulation solutions help enable the company to meet stringent power/performance requirements, ensure reliable operations across a wide-range of frequencies and deliver products with tight time-to-market constraints.
“As a leading provider of IoT solutions, we are committed to delivering the most comprehensive and highly integrated IoT solutions with world-class accuracy, performance, reliability and ease-of-use,” explained Marc Rougee, Atmel Vice President of Strategic Initiatives. “ANSYS engineering simulation tools give us the confidence that the design of our products will meet our customers’ power and performance targets to enable next-generation secure and connected designs for IoT.”
For those unfamiliar with ANSYS, the Pittsburgh-based company provides clarity and insight to customers’ most complex design challenges through fast, accurate and reliable engineering simulation. Their technology allow organizations, spanning across a number of industries, to predict with confidence that their products will thrive in the real world.
“IoT is creating tremendous growth opportunities for the entire electronics ecosystem, from semiconductor manufacturing to systems integration to applications development. ANSYS is excited to be a partner to the Atmel design teams as they develop innovative technologies that fuel machine-to-machine communication and the industrial Internet,” added Aveek Sarkar, ANSYS Vice President.
As its name implies, the ‘A5D36 is a SoM based on the Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-A5 SAMA5D36.
EMAC has launched the SoM-A5D36, a system-on-module that runs Linux on a Cortex-A5-based Atmel SAMA5D3 processor, and offers up to 4GB of Flash, industrial temperature, and an optional carrier board. The wide temperature, fanless ARM 536 MHz SoM features 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet along with up to six serial ports. Beyond that, the board boasts up to 16MB of serial data flash and up to 512MB of LP DDR2 RAM, as well as supports LCD and resistive touch interfaces.
This isn’t the first time the Atmel | SMART SAMA5D3 has experienced some love from computer-on-module (COM) vendors. In fact, the Cortex-A5-based SoC has shown up on the ShiraTech AT-501, the Acme Systems Acqua A5, and the MYIR MYC-SAMA5D3X — all of which except the Acqua A5 use SODIMM connectors.
Using the same small 200-pin SODIMM form factor utilized by other EMAC SoM modules, the SoM-A5D36 packs all the core ARM processor functionality, including Flash, memory, serial ports, Ethernet, I2S audio, PWMs, timer/counters, A/D, digital I/O lines, clock/calendar, and more. The SoM-A5D36 is also designed to plug into a carrier board that contains all the connectors and any custom I/O required for an application. This approach enables a user to design a custom carrier board that meets for I/O, dimensional and connector requirements without having to worry about the processor, memory and standard I/O functionality.
Key specs of the SoM-A5D36 include:
Processor: Atmel | SMART SAMA5D36
Memory:
Up to 512MB LP DDR2 SDRAM
16MB serial data flash
Up to 4MB eMMC flash
Networking: Gigabit Ethernet PHY; optional 2x GbE
Primary I/O:
3x USB 2.0 host (1x includes device support)
6x serial (4x defined) — 1x full, 3x RTS/CTS, 2x no handshake
