New Industry Products

Wireless BLE5 SoC for Energy Harvesting Powered Devices

October 22, 2018 by Paul Shepard

Ambiq Micro today released the Apollo3 Blue Wireless SoC with integrated Bluetooth low energy (BLE5), updated peripherals, additional memory, an advanced DMA engine & TurboSPOT™. This new product extends the capabilities of Ambiq Micro's Apollo Blue family and is available now for battery and energy harvesting powered IoT, hearable, wearable & voice-activated edge devices.

The Apollo3 Blue's TurboSPOT™ brings groundbreaking levels of energy efficiency to mobile, battery powered devices by increasing the computational capabilities of the ARM Cortex M4F core to 96MHz while lowering the active power consumption to <6uA/MHz.

An integrated DMA engine combined with the extra computing bandwidth gives designers the flexibility to add more complex sensor processing algorithms to their energy-sensitive products without sacrificing quality or battery life.

The Apollo3 Blue also provides a dedicated second core for the ultra-low power BLE5 connectivity platform providing superior RF throughput and leaving plenty of resources available for user applications. The radio performance and interoperability has already been proven to be reliable and robust in real-world consumer products which are currently shipping in massive volume.

"Ambiq Micro's Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT™) platform continues to bring unprecedented levels of energy efficiency to algorithm providers, ODMs and OEMs," said Aaron Grassian, Ambiq Micro's Vice President of Marketing.

"The Apollo family is already being used to bring neural networks to battery-powered hearables and remote controls with always-on voice assistant integration and commands. The Apollo3 Blue further solidifies Ambiq Micro's capabilities to add AI inference engines like voice and predictive sensory processing to ultra-low power edge devices," concluded Grassian.