It’s been a few crazy busy months at work but I should be getting back on track with regular postings next week. This week I just have a few things that might be of interest ...
First, my company started a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo last week. We have working prototypes of our µPower Analyzer and µCurrent Probe and need help to ramp up production of the µCurrent Probe. We’re offering pre-orders on both products at a 20% discount. We also have a low-cost version of the µCurrent Probe for the Maker community planned for later this year but if we can pre-sell the first production run of 75 units (with a 30% discount!) we’ll move that up for production in the June. The link is below, please help us spread the word about this.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ultra-low-current-measurement-tools/x/6418386
I was introduced to a company a few months ago that has some super low current real time clocks. Ambiq Micro in Austin, TX has a family of RTCs (with and without power management features) with 7X lower current than the industry standard RTCs. They use a technology developed at the University of Michigan called “Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology” that allows their RTCs to operate as low as 14nA. Ambiq has announced they are working on an ARM Cortex M0 micro utilizing this technology to be sampled later this year (ARM is one of their investors).
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319543&
I came across these related articles this past week. They have some good numbers showing just how much of an impact firmware/software can have on power consumption. The first article shows that encrypted storage uses about 6X more power than unencrypted storage and in one test the encryption software accounted for 42% of the CPU utilization. The second article indicated that the Flash memory used for data storage only used 1% of the power required for storage operations - the OS, file system and encryption code accounted for the other 99%.
http://www.zdnet.com/making-mobile-storage-energy-efficient-7000026501/
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=00684248-B98A-C8FB-C6FB4D3C469CE91B
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