
New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades - xbmcuser
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/new-arm-powered-chip-aims-for-battery-life-measured-in-decades/
======
zaroth

      The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy
      capture from the body, as Andreas Eieland, Atmel's Director
      of Product Marketing for low-power products, demonstrated at
      CES earlier this year.
    

The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120v battery, and over
25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with the Atmel SAM L21 32-bit ARM MCU, the
machines had found... all the energy they would ever need.

~~~
jacquesm
That quote is so totally non-scientific. For movies to get basic physics so
terribly wrong is very sloppy.

~~~
yen223
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who isn't terribly bothered by
sloppy science in movies. I prefer movies that are entertaining or thought-
provoking, not factual.

Besides, the Matrix is about how our world is a simulation - who's to say how
physics works in their "real" world?

~~~
jacquesm
If you want something to be 'thought provoking' then make it as close to
reality as you can, that's good SF. The only thoughts this provokes in me is
'ouch'.

------
rasz_pl
It all started with this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/)

ARM low power consumption was an accident caused by financial constrains.
Small team with no money (Acorn was starting to go downhill at the time)
forced Sophie Wilson/Steve Furber team to be clever with resources.

In 1987 hand routed ARM2 build with 30K transistors ran at 8MHz reaching 4
MIPS (of 32bit operations). Coincidentally Intels 386 build by an army of
hundred engineers supplemented by state of the art
emulation/validation/automation software (Mossim etc, &) and divided into
large groups working on individual parts of the design achieved ... 4 MIPS at
33MHz using 275K 2x smaller transistors and >20x the power.

&[http://webee.technion.ac.il/people/kolodny/ftp/IntelCADPaper...](http://webee.technion.ac.il/people/kolodny/ftp/IntelCADPaperFinal2.pdf)

&software born from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution)
and following Darpa programs

~~~
Perdition
I don't think that is a fair comparison. The 386 was a true CISC design while
the ARM2 was RISC. One of the major points of RISC was to reduce silicon
complexity by using a less complex design (and shoving the complexity onto
software).

Intel could have built an equal or better chip than the ARM2 but they were
worrying about servicing the already established market for x86.

P.S. Is it even reasonable to compare MIPS between RISC and CISC designs? A
RISC chip has to execute several instructions to do what can be done in one
CISC instruction.

~~~
T-hawk
Intel did in fact build a RISC chip contemporary with the 386/486:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860)

It had great instruction throughput performance by the specs but lacked in
real applications, thanks to the sufficiently smart compilers never coming to
be.

~~~
kps
The i860's theoretical throughput was achievable only in very special cases in
tight floating point kernels. Most code couldn't possibly perform as well, no
matter how smart the compiler.

Intel's sane RISC was the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960​](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960​),
somewhat by accident.

~~~
AlyssaRowan
And of course, by the time we got to the Pentium Pro - and more or less
everything ever since - we ended up with a hybrid pipelined superscalar design
which takes advantage of the legacy of support (and, compared to VLIW, tight
instruction coding), but as part of the decode pipeline, translates that to
RISC µops inside with microcode.

The Transmeta Crusoe was a particularly notable (if not particularly
_successful_ ) case in point, which brought that layer a little more
visibility than most, although in all honestly, was probably mostly well-known
for having been Linus Torvalds' employer.

There never was a particularly bright line between RISC and CISC, and it's
only gotten blurrier with the decades as the two paradigms stole good ideas
from each other.

That's not to say there isn't the occasional throwback, sometimes for a good
reason. I've got an adorable little slug of a 'transparent' microprocessor on
my desk which I hope sees the light of day sometime (when it actually works,
because I've bricked it - first time designer == _way_ too many errata! :P)
because it's got some fun ideas for trust, like the host being able to
directly read (and verify) all the software it's running.

------
Zardoz84
I think that this just killed the one of the triumph card of PIC micro-
controllers.

Seriously, Microchip uC have now any interesting thing apart of a lot of embed
I/O hardware inside ? ARM based uCs now are cheap, low powered and have far
better IDEs and compilers...

~~~
pietrofmaggi
The strongest selling point for PIC is always the quality of the I/O hardware
and the attention to the low-volume market. The CPU core is just something
that you need to deal with. ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than
sometimes takes forever to reach the low-volume markets.

Lead time is always an important parameter to consider when choosing a new MCU
for a low-volume project :-)

I used to start new projects looking on digikey website more than anything.

~~~
minthd
>> ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than sometimes takes forever
to reach the low-volume markets.

But in the low-volume markets what wins is usually better software support,
and with it's mbed-os(and other software frameworks availble for ARM mcu's),
ARM is surely to win here.

------
notthetup
Ah! But this chip only has a sub-uA sleep mode. So it will have the said
decades battery life if it sleeps most of the time, which might be true in the
cases of some kind of IoT application, but not if it's actually running often.

~~~
weland
Meet marketing. I will personally buy pizza for one week to any marketing
department that, when announcing a new product, publishes figures that are
actually useful.

Oh look, we just launched a MCU with a power consumption _so low_ that you can
keep it powered for twenty years. As long as you don't do anything with it. Of
course, every other figure that would make this one useful (such as per-module
current consumption, time to sleep) is missing.

It's _especially_ funny when everyone claims they have "the best" or "state of
the art" consumption, but when you factor in everything else it turns out
they're pretty much within the noise figure of the current state of affairs.

In my whole engineering career, I'm yet to see a press release or a market
launch that isn't full of bullshit. Just hand me the bloody datasheet and give
me a break, folks.

------
xwintermutex
Now we only need batteries that don't self-discharge within decades.

~~~
weland
This is likely intended to be use with batteries that can recharge from very
low-energy sources, e.g. energy captured from the body. It has very small
energy consumption in sleep mode, so the battery can charge between wake
cycles. 200 nA is, indeed, very low.

------
logicallee
meanwhile the latest and greatest 2015 device is an all-day wristwatch the
weight of a pack of cards [1] (for the smaller Apple watch [2]) that in
Apple's own "watch test" tells time for up to 48 days before dying --- whoops,
no, I meant 48 _hours_ [3] :

>Testing conducted by Apple in March 2015 using preproduction Apple Watch and
software paired with an iPhone using preproduction software with 5 time checks
(4 seconds each) per hour.

This is as compared with simple mechanical wristwatches that are self-charging
(through wrist movement) and can be worn _indefinitely_ , or have 72-100 hour
power reserves from winding. [4] This is _mechanical_ power we're talking
about.

So don't talk to me about decades until you can get more than 48 hours of
battery life....from a watch.

1
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_52-card_deck](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_52-card_deck)

2 [https://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch-edition/18-karat-
yel...](https://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch-edition/18-karat-yellow-gold-
case-black-sport-band/)

3
[https://www.apple.com/watch/battery.html](https://www.apple.com/watch/battery.html)

4 [http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.php?250883-List-of-
watches...](http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.php?250883-List-of-watches-
with-3-7-days-Power-Reserve)

~~~
maxerickson
Sure, the Apple watch is fairly likely to be a ridiculous geegaw.

It's also going to do a lot more than the mechanical watches you are comparing
it to.

If you just want to tell time, there is a wide market of solar watches:

[http://www.casio-intl.com/asia-
mea/en/wat/standard/solar_pow...](http://www.casio-intl.com/asia-
mea/en/wat/standard/solar_power/)

[http://www.seiko-cleanenergy.com/watches/solar/](http://www.seiko-
cleanenergy.com/watches/solar/)

The Seiko tech runs for 6 months with no charging (left in total darkness).

~~~
ant6n
I wonder what the actually numbers for these watches are. Energy received via
the solar cell, energy consumption, battery capacity.

~~~
maxerickson
Some bookending it is as least possible. They imply that the draw is no more
than 1/60th the input (1 minute of sun for 1 hour). The 3 hours for 6 months
would be much lower, checking their documentation, it enters a low power mode
that freezes the hands (it still keeps time, the hands are advanced when power
becomes available).

The input is limited to something like 10 square cm (that's a bit more than 3
cm by 3cm, or a circle ~3.5 cm across). 1000 watts / square meter is usually
used as peak sun, so the max input would be ~1 watt (but actual energy
captured would probably be more like 1/10 of that).

3 Watt hours is a very respectable figure for a AA battery, so it clearly
isn't storing that much power. After looking up that figure, 10% efficiency
for the solar cell is probably high.

------
minthd
If we're talking about low-power mcu, here's something that might interest the
the hacker community:

A new API,to be released in april, that enables programming mcu's to very low
power,easily(versus very high complexity of currently needed to achieve low
power). It uses the mbed, which is of similar complexity to the arduino:

[http://community.arm.com/groups/internet-of-
things/blog/2015...](http://community.arm.com/groups/internet-of-
things/blog/2015/03/12/reducing-power-consumption-with-the-arm-mbed-low-power-
apis-and-efm32-mcus)

------
datenwolf
True to the Internet culture Atmel could not help it but had to Rickroll
people at their booth. I like it.

------
sschueller
Would it be feasible to power this cheap of electromagnetic radiation?

[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/413744/wireless-
power-h...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/413744/wireless-power-
harvesting-for-cell-phones/)

~~~
minthd
This guys sell components that enable battery free operation(according to
their claims) using rf energy:

[http://www.powercastco.com/](http://www.powercastco.com/)

BTW, rf energy is generally among the lowest energy harvesting sources, and in
many cases environmental light, vibration(for example on a machine) ,and heat
are much stronger energy harvesting sources, and most likely available at low
cost.

------
undrwatr
[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326124](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326124)

------
andrewflnr
It'll be an odd world if we ever reach the point where we throw hardware away
before the battery runs out.

------
rikkus
Still waiting for clockless chips here...

~~~
cheradenine01
Been done - on ARM instruction sets, no less.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor)

~~~
euccastro
Also on Forth instruction sets:

[http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA1...](http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA144)

~~~
rlonstein
Not trolling... is this still a going concern, shipping eval boards, etc? I
saw this a couple of years ago, someone commented on HN, and then nothing. I
liked the eval board specs and it seemed reasonably priced given the low
volume (maybe a hard sell when STM is all but giving away kits).

~~~
euccastro
I got my eval board one year ago. I'm sure if they had closed shop they'd have
put a warning on their site, but you can always email them to make sure.

------
minikites
I see that it's 32-bit, is the year 2038 problem a significant concern for a
device like this?

~~~
zokier
That is purely a software issue. Word size does not limit how big numbers
computer can handle, it just implies how big numbers it can handle
_efficiently_. Even lowly 8-bit computers/microcontrollers can do arbitrary
precision/bignum math.

~~~
illumen
Depending on your definition of big.

