Startup Energy Micro AS (Oslo, Norway) has launched its first products, the EFM32 family of microcontrollers, otherwise known as Gecko, with the claim the microcontrollers offer more than four times the battery life of existing 8-, 16- or 32-bit microcontrollers.
The devices are based on an ARM Cortex-M3 license, and Energy Micro said that the company will provide 22 different parts over the next few months, with most of them sampling in the fourth quarter and becoming available in volume in the first quarter of 2010. A development kit (EFM32 Gecko Development Kit) is available.
The EFM32G feature set includes a 4x40 segment LCD controller running at less than 900 nA; an 8-channel, 12-bit 1-Msample/sec ADC running at less than 200 µA; a brown-out detector running at less than 100 nA; a 32-kHz real time counter running at 50 nA; and a UART capable of 9600 bps at 100 nA.
The microcontrollers are fabricated using the 180-nm ultra low leakage process from TSMC and have been proven to consume less than 180 µA per MHz while executing real code from flash memory, the company said. The standby current is 900 nA with an operating real-time clock, power-on reset, brown-out detector and full RAM and CPU retention, or less than 20 nA in the microcontroller's deepest sleep mode. The microcontrollers provide up to 128 KB of flash memory and up to 16 KB of RAM.
EFM32G microcontroller products are available in a variety of packages, including QFN32, QFN64, QFP100, and BGA112. The EFM32G operates from a single supply rail between 1.8 and 3.8 V. The operating temperature range is –40°C to +85°C.
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