ARM-based integrated processor aims at photo frames

NXP announced the availability of its Cortex-M0 based LPC1100 with the members LPC1111, LPC1112, LPC1113 and LPC1114 microcontroller by the end of the year 2009. This new family marks the lowest price of known 32-bit controllers on the market. These devices will compete directly with the recently announced Energy Micro EFM32 Gecko offerings. Both approaches have their benefits. NXP is using a CPU that offers an even lower power approach than the Cortex-M3 and can run faster in MHz than the Energy Micro implementation. On the other hand, the Cortex-M3 offers 30% more MIPS/MHz. It will be very interesting to see the roll-out of the STM32L family that is due very soon as well. As a MCU costumer this can only be good news, very low power, small packages and very low pricing.

Energy Micro from Norway has developed the EFM32 Gecko family of low power 32bit microcontrollers based on the ARM Cortex-M3 architecture with low power clocks and peripherals that consumes less than 180µA per MHz while executing real life code from Flash memory and the lowest active mode current consumption of any microcontroller.

Its standby current consumption is also the lowest, at typically 900nA while running real time clock, power-on reset, brown-out detector and full RAM and CPU retention and less than 20nA in its deepest sleep mode. Brownout requires analog components that will always draw a certain current and there are very few companies that can do this together with the real-time clock below 1µA. Probably the most impressive feature is the full RAM retention and still remaining below the 1µA threshold. The start-up time of less than 2µs is also the industry’s fastest. The power is lower than traditional 16 or 8bit devices from Silicon Labs, Texas Instruments and Microchip (see chart).