10 ms·
New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
- zaroth 12y agoThe 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.
- stedaniels 12y agoValid reference. Well, I think it is, might not fulfil Wikipedia guidelines though.
- fijal 12y agobritish BTU or american BTU? please use SI standard measures for those who don't happen to live in America :-)
- antimagic 12y agoI'm trying to figure out if you're joking or not. BTU = British Thermal Unit and is pretty much the standard measure used around the world when talking about energy use associated with heating. It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, regardless of where you find yourself in the world...
- realityking 12y agoWhile only one data point, in Germany BTU is very uncommon. Energy used for heating is expressed as kWh, same as with electricity.
- huxley 12y agoBTUs are used a lot in Canada, but Canada only made about 9 years of progress toward metrification between 1976 and 1985, I was still in high school when our Metric Commission was abolished along with most legal requirements to use metric units, while still retaining them. Maybe it's generational (I'm GenX), so I'm not sure if all Canadians muddle through both systems as much as I do but I seem to live in a constant superposition state between Metric and Imperial, with little sense about which I'll use for any particular purpose. I use Celsius for cooking and low temperatures, but Fahrenheit for body temperature and most room temperatures; kilometres for long distances but inches and feet for height and most short distances; pounds for body weight, but never ounces (for that I use grams), for cooking and large weights I seem to mostly use metric units. Volumes are almost exclusively metric, I suspect because we also went through a transition when gallons shrunk from Imperial (4.54609 litres) to US gallons (3.785 litres). I envy European consistency when it comes to metric.
- lione 12y agoImperial is mostly for measurements related to the body, (temperature, height/length, weight), presumably due to the amount of people who grew up with it and it's ubiquity in the American media. Pretty much every other aspect of those measurements not related to the body are done in Metric (It's -10c out, my yogurt is 750g, and it's about 5km to the store). Most room temperatures are in Celsius, or have dual options, and those that aren't are typically because we heavily use American made thermostats due to our trade connections, or it's an older model. Almost everything else uses Metric except for small exceptions like Construction which is again due to long/common use and trading with America. Everything with scientists/doctors is Metric.
- richthegeek 12y agoAs an additional data point, BTU isn't used in Britain very much these days. As with germany, kilowatt-hour is the preferred unit of (heating) energy.
- antimagic 12y agoUm, I should have elaborated in my original post - it most definitely is still heavily used in the UK by, for example, architects when evaluating how much heating a house will need. My original post wasn't terribly clear about that, my bad... Yes, consumer-facing information these days is indeed more likely to be expressed in kilowatt-hours...
- elsjaako 12y agoI built a BTU-measuring device for a british customer, and he explained they had been using the metric system since the 70's.
- fsloth 12y ago"It's the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit" Now, presume there is no gauge at hand to measure a pound less a thermometer to measure fahrenheits. Often outside of commonwealth territories and US we use SI :)
- antimagic 12y agoOK, I'm going to get grumpy here, sorry about that. Your comment is a perfect demonstration of middlebrow criticism, and adds exactly zero to the discussion. Firstly, I'm Australian. We use SI measurements - your comment is not just smug, but wrong. Secondly, are you honestly postulating that people understand the underlying reality of what a kilowatt hour actually means? That they have a "gauge" that can measure kilowatts? Of course they don't, and for that matter most people that use BTUs don't really understand what they represent either. They just know that it's a measurement of energy-use. All they really want is something that allows them to compare two options, and frankly, the units matter not at all.
- nezza-_- 12y agoHe is quoting The Matrix: The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need.
- mapt 12y agoWhich of course always bugged me. Not just because of what I know of biology, but the second sentence. "Combined with a form of fusion". The thing we understand to eventually provide abundant clean unlimited electricity (okay, relatively speaking). It's a bit like saying "The human trigger finger can exert 300 pounds per square inch of force, and perform over 500,000 foot-pounds of work. Combined with a standard-issue pistol-grip chainsaw, the Zombie-Hunting Academy had found all the weapon it would ever need."
- jacquesm 12y agoFrom a physics point of view it is complete bull-shit.
- mjburgess 12y agoThe original script had machines using human brains for their computing power but the execs thought that would be too complicated for people to understand.
- Already__Taken 12y agoHow would that script have ended? With humans required for computing power there's no way the machines give up their existence to release the humans. At least I can imagine them using alternate power sources with collaboration for the humans. Cleaning the sky for example.
- maxerickson 12y agoThey could still cooperate. The movies even had a human character who, having been given freedom, chose the Matrix. (there could also be reasons for trade; maybe the humans spend time in the Matrix in exchange for energy or whatever)
- robmcm 12y agoI think they are referring to kinetic energy from body movement, although tapping into heat loss and other wasted energy sources would be awesome too.
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- jacquesm 12y agoThat quote is so totally non-scientific. For movies to get basic physics so terribly wrong is very sloppy.
- yen223 12y agoSometimes 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?
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- jacquesm 12y agoIf 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'.
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- colechristensen 12y agoEarly drafts had the machines using human brains as CPUs, but the idea was killed by suits who thought it'd be too hard to understand. It would have made the whole premise of the movie make much more sense.
- mrec 12y agoDan Simmon's 'Hyperion' trilogy used this idea (before Matrix) and I seem to recall it being one of the less silly things in there. A book can afford to be less mass-market-friendly than a movie, obviously, but I think it did pretty well.
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- tomswartz07 12y agoSo, I'm curious how they convert the body heat to electricity in such a small area. If it were for something like a Stirling Cycle, you'd need a fairly substantial surface area to disburse the heat difference.
- Filligree 12y agoPeltier? And I suppose they would. You could still make a piece of clothing with heat-sinks sewn in, but I have no idea how expensive that'd be.
- Zardoz84 12y agoI 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 12y agoThe 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 12y ago>> 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.
- raverbashing 12y agoWell... PIC is weird. But it does the job and as the other comment said, they had a lot of models with a lot of devices (ADC, DAC, USB, fully configurable ports, etc). Also cheap and available in "hobbyist" form factors (DIP) Yes, you would either go to Assembly (which is harder to use than "tradicional uCs" - like 8051 family, Z80, etc), C compilers (some limited), or there was even PIC basic, heh ARM? Write in C, "fire and forget" unless you are doing something more complicated (like audio synth - yes, I did this)
- deutronium 12y agoI quite liked PIC stuff for the hardware USB support, which I used with a PIC32 DIP chip. They also have a gcc port for their architectures now, which is quite nice xc8,16,32. Although apparently the 'free' version of it, doesn't provide all optimizations annoyingly. I'm starting to use ARM dev boards now, because of things like the MHz and the nice compilers available.
- xwintermutex 12y agoNow we only need batteries that don't self-discharge within decades.
- weland 12y agoThis 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.
- minthd 12y agoI think tadiran has such batteries. http://www.tadiranbatteries.de/pdf/articles/20-year-battery.pdf http://www.tadiranbatteries.de/pdf/articles/20-year-battery....
- jloughry 12y agoLithium thionyl chloride batteries can last 40 years, based on a self-discharge rate of 1% per year. They're used for things like sensors buried in concrete where it's a hassle to change the batteries.
- notthetup 12y agoAh! 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.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y agoVirtually any IoT device will (in a manner of speaking) still be running often.
- weland 12y agoMeet 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.
- sschueller 12y agoWould it be feasible to power this cheap of electromagnetic radiation? http://www.technologyreview.com/news/413744/wireless-power-harvesting-for-cell-phones/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/413744/wireless-power-h...
- minthd 12y agoThis 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.
- rikkus 12y agoStill waiting for clockless chips here...
- cheradenine01 12y agoBeen done - on ARM instruction sets, no less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor
- euccastro 12y agoAlso on Forth instruction sets: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA144 http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/index.html#GA1...
- rlonstein 12y agoNot 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 12y agoI 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 12y agoI see that it's 32-bit, is the year 2038 problem a significant concern for a device like this?
- justincormack 12y agoNot if you run an operating system/code with 64 bit time_t, like NetBSD or OpenBSD. I can't imagine you would run an OS on it though.
- pantalaimon 12y agoLinux too - but you wouldn't run any of that with 32k of RAM.
- Dwolb 12y agoI'd rather use another degree of freedom: how small can I make my battery?
- nemik 12y agoJust because it's 32-bit doesn't mean its code can't store 64-bit ints. There's just a few more instructions that are needed to manipulate it. But it's not a big deal. That's how computers are able to store, retrieve, and manipulate any variables (like strings) that might be bigger than their address space.
- zokier 12y agoThat 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 12y agoDepending on your definition of big.
- jschwartzi 12y agoProbably not. These would be useful in wireless sensors and other devices where having an accurate absolute time is not as important as knowing precisely how fast time is ticking away. If I were going to use something like this I probably wouldn't even bother noting the absolute time of a sample at the point of measurement. Rather, I would just periodically synchronize the network with a clock pulse and let each individual node figure out whether they're running fast or slow, and by how much, if it even matters. If it doesn't then just note the time of arrival at whatever server is controlling the network and use that time exclusively. Then you can buy one 64-bit machine and leave it running all the time, and as an added bonus you no longer need to worry about whether each node has the correct time.
- undrwatr 12y agohttp://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326124 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326124
- rasz_pl 12y agoIt 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_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec... 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/IntelCADPaperFinal2.pdf http://webee.technion.ac.il/people/kolodny/ftp/IntelCADPaper... &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 12y agoI 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.
- yuhong 12y agoInterestingly, there is a thread on RWT that talked about this where Linus Torvalds was involved. It seems that it wasn't until 486DX2 in 1992 that x86 was beginning to beat RISC and even 68040 on the lower end. And remember that 33Mhz 386s did not even arrive until 1989 or so.
- weland 12y ago
- minthd 12y agoIf 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/2015/03/12/reducing-power-consumption-with-the-arm-mbed-low-power-apis-and-efm32-mcus http://community.arm.com/groups/internet-of-things/blog/2015...
- logicallee 12y agomeanwhile 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-yellow-gold-case-black-sport-band/ https://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch-edition/18-karat-yel... 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-with-3-7-days-Power-Reserve http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.php?250883-List-of-watches...
- mwcampbell 12y agoThe Pebble has much better battery life than the Apple Watch; it can last for a week on a 130 mAh battery. To achieve that, the Pebble uses a microcontroller with 512K of flash (plus 4 MB of flash on a separate chip) and 128K of RAM. Presumably the Apple Watch uses a higher-end application processor and DRAM.
- maxerickson 12y agoSure, 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_power/ http://www.casio-intl.com/asia-mea/en/wat/standard/solar_pow... 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 12y ago
- datenwolf 12y agoTrue to the Internet culture Atmel could not help it but had to Rickroll people at their booth. I like it.
- andrewflnr 12y agoIt'll be an odd world if we ever reach the point where we throw hardware away before the battery runs out.