“We have been sampling Apollo 2 for a while,” said Scott Hanson, the company’s founder and CTO. “It runs at 48MHz – twice the speed of Apollo 1 – and is four times as energy efficient. Because it enables longer battery life, customers can add more features to their products.”
According to Ambiq, wearables developers need either longer battery life or smaller batteries. They also want to create devices which are always on, always connected and always aware. It says it meets these goals with Apollo 2.
The device, which is designed around an ARM Cortex-M4F core, features high precision 14bit A/D converters, as well as a voltage comparator, temperature sensor and a range of interfaces. “It also includes a pulse density modulation interface for a digital microphone,” Hanson noted.
Amongst the improvements over the previous device is the provision of a 16k cache. “Apollo 1 didn’t have a cache,” Hanson said, “but that’s not possible if you run at 48MHz. It brings higher energy efficiency because you don’t have to run from memory.” He added that Apollo 2 also takes advantage of a new TSMC process.
Hanson said Ambiq’s road map will address computation, connectivity, sensing and actuation, and power management. “We will continue to innovate,” Hanson contended, “rolling out devices with higher frequencies consuming less energy. Extrapolating, it’s likely you’ll see a sub threshold processor which is capable of running Android.”
