Arm unveils 1mm x 1mm 32bit chip: "years of battery life"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/technology-17345934

by replax • 14 years ago

281 102 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

rwmj• 14 years ago

Link to non-mobile site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17345934

I'm a bit surprised this hasn't been done before.

Can this chip be solar powered (I mean, obviously, with a small solar cell)?

justincormack• 14 years ago

No reason why should not be solar powered. Around here all the parking meters are solar powered, just for cost of installation reasons. Wiring electricity in to 50bn devices would be a pain, unless they are electric anyway.

ht_th• 14 years ago

Just curious, wouldn't a place that needs parking meters already be on the grid? Assuming we use parking meters to earn back the costs of building the parking lot or to stimulate the use of other forms of transportation than a car in that area.

On the other hand, having autonomous off-the-grid parking meters might be easier to install and maintain by a third party. Plus it allows you to start growing parking meters everywhere, even in the middle of nowhere. Let them pay!

ajuc• 14 years ago

I've seen solar powered road photoradars, and road lights on some crossings between cities. Solar cells are on 2-3 meter pole, at +- 45 degree, and have sth like 0.5 square meter surface, and big box the size of car battery under the solar cell.

I guess it's more cost effective than draw the wires a few kilometers from the city.

EDIT: sth like that http://www.google.pl/imgres?q=%C5%9Bwiat%C5%82a+baterie+slon...

DanBC• 14 years ago

Improvements in "Ultracapacitors" will help with solar-powering devices.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_double-layer_capacitor)

com• 14 years ago

It has been done before, at least according to the article, it appears that there already is competition in this market:

  Arizona-headquartered Microchip Technology designs and builds a rival range of 32-bit "Pic" microcontroller, while California-based Atmel offers 32-bit "Avr" products.

But doing a bit of fact-checking, it might not be so simple.

The Microchip website gives 404 errors when I try to read their press release http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/press-release/mic... - not really a good sign, hard to verify any claims.

The Atmel TinyAVR devices are small (2mmx2mm) but appear only to be 8-bit and aren't really comparable to the Arm offering.

lunarscape• 14 years ago

32 bit uCs are nothing new. However PIC32s are large high performance devices with AES, Ethernet, USB etc built in depending on model[1]. They operate in a totally different area. You can use one to run a webserver and drive an LCD panel for example.

Atmel also offer 32 bit uCs in the form of AVR32 and ARM based parts.

[1] http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/family/32bit/appl...

Tuna-Fish2• 14 years ago

> I'm a bit surprised this hasn't been done before.

It kind of has been. This is not the first tiny low-power microprocessor out there -- it's just that ARM keeps pushing the envelope. The last "most power-efficient tiny 32-bit cpu" was Cortex-M0, of which this one is an evolutionary improvement.

Most of the embedded industry is still using really simple 8 or 16 bit microcontrollers. The business stragegy of ARM in the space is to push more advanced and complex cpus down to the space and grab marketshare by providing chips that are easier to program. It also helps that the size of the chip itself is a complete non-issue (the article referred to 1mm², while in reality the area for the core itself is actually less than 0.01mm² on a 40G process), and ARM can sell code density because they have more powerful instructions than the typical microcontroller, so while their cpu is bigger, the memory it needs is smaller.

acqq2• 14 years ago

ARM Cortex M0+ processor specs:

http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m0plu...

Advantages over 8-bit and 16-bit processors for embedded solutions, according to ARM:

http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m0plu...

keenerd• 14 years ago

Interesting that they only make comparisons with PIC and 8051. AVR still blows them away on many angles; particularly energy efficiency, community, ease of use on not-windows, and price. (MSP430 too, for efficiency and price.)

I'm fooling around with the lower power ARM chips on weekends, and they seem like a great option when you really want to shoehorn in a full operating system somewhere.

tesseract4• 14 years ago

I don't think of AVRs as being particularly cheap relative to their competition but I haven't tried to buy any in quantity lately so what do I know. Maybe things have changed.

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

I don't understand the connection on why we need such an efficient chip for implementation in devices which are plugged in.

If the economic benefits were so strong for those devices being connected that should have already happened.

What am I missing?

acqq2• 14 years ago

Can you please write a word or two what you see as an advantage of AVR? I admit I don't have any experience but I'd really like to know. Thanks.

For other readers, AVR:

http://www.atmel.com/products/microcontrollers/avr/default.a...

tesseract4• 14 years ago

Seems like a fairly straightforward evolution, they are claiming 11.2uW/MHz vs. 16 for the non-plus M0. Sounds like the instruction set is the same. I'm curious whether the M0 has been getting significant design wins over the established low-power microcontrollers like PIC, MSP430, etc.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

It looks like the trade-off is peripherals: the M0+ (as far as I can tell) doesn't have the goodies a generic PIC at the same price-point does.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

Replying to myself: judging by the Freescale chips out there, the peripherals will probably get added by IP integrators. Should be interesting.

antipax• 14 years ago

Hope that when the "smart grid" or whatever you want to call it does come around, it comes with the electricity equivalent of net neutrality.

javert2• 14 years ago

Wow. Let's have government bureaucrats control not only how we use the Net, but also when we can use our appliances!

Why not just use nuclear to produce abundant energy?

afterburner• 14 years ago

Because it's expensive.

Symmetry6• 14 years ago

The idea behind a smart grid is usually some form of the local utility company taking money off your electric bill if your appliances are smart about not using energy at times of peak load. Nothing about the concept means the government has to be involved.

Symmetry6• 14 years ago

Well, ZigBee is what most governments are pushing for smart girds, and isn't totally free it is an open standard that anyone can join. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee

</shameless plug>

kiloaper2• 14 years ago

2.4GHz doesn't sound like a great frequency for smart grids if the nodes are spaced far apart.

sambeau• 14 years ago

ARM is a brilliant (if not the poster-boy) example of why the UK government should be investing in new technology companies rather than car manufacturing and banking.

jahewson2• 14 years ago

Especially as ARM originated from Acorn, whose success came from manufacturing the BBC Micro, for a publicly funded organisation (the BBC).

gaius5• 14 years ago

Ahem, Acorn paid the BBC a fee for every Beeb sold, as a licensing fee on use of the logo.

Acorn were also almost overlooked in favour of a company called Grundy, which had government backing, but inferior technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundy_NewBrain

swombat• 14 years ago

To be fair, via TSB, the UK is investing in new technology companies... not sure how that compares to their investment in car manufacturing, though. However, afaik the main "investment" in banking was to save the banks that were going bust.

Disclaimer: I might be completely wrong about the above!

frobozz2• 14 years ago

And yet, according to: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509

"If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain"

ataggart• 14 years ago

The poor state of car manufacturing and banking would seem to argue against inflicting "government investing" on new technology companies.

chalst• 14 years ago

The banking industry managed to wreak itself without serious government investment. The trouble was an absence of effective deterrents to bankers seeking dangerously high levels of leverage.

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

ARM employs about 2 000 people [1]. They're definitely a huge boon for the British tech community and competitiveness, but justifying government support for such a small employee base would be untenable.

[1] http://www.arm.com/about/company-profile/index.php?setcookie...

gaius5• 14 years ago

Northern Rock employed 5000.

sycren• 14 years ago

Most of the 2000 may be highly skilled or at least a large proportion to that of a bank, increasing funding in such a company may increase the number of people taking up science and engineering disciplines in education.

arethuza5• 14 years ago

How many of those 2000 are in the UK?

Symmetry6• 14 years ago

There's also all the other small companies that benefit from being near ARM, for instance the chip design team in Britain my company picked up.

ajross• 14 years ago

Yes. There's a temptation, because they both "make CPUs" to view ARM as the "next Intel", but it's not like that at all. Intel is an industrial manufacturing company. They happen to manufacture CPUs that they've designed, but "what they do" (or at least, where their money comes from and where the bulk of it goes to) is manufacturing. In the ARM world, all that cash flow goes through TSMC, Samsung, TI, Global Foundries, Fujitsu, etc... Basically none of it goes through the UK.

ARM's model, of course, is absolutely the future of semiconductor design. But it's not going to bring an Intel-sized industry to the UK.

gaius5• 14 years ago

I suppose you are too young to remember "picking winners", Harold Wilson, British Leyland, Red Robbo... Or more directly, Grundy and their NewBrain vs Acorn... Historically, government meddling in industry in the UK has been a disaster.

adaml_623• 14 years ago

Serious question. Was it a disaster or did they just pick the losing team?

Sometimes the government picking a loser can still cause a market to expand.

GFischer• 14 years ago

What went wrong with Leyland? It's a very respected trademark here in Uruguay, we still have some Leyland buses in operation here, including 1949 Leyland Olympics (!!!)

It's even on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyland-MCW_Olympic

"The Olympic was popular in Montevideo, with 240 entering service in the 1950s and 1960s. 50 of these were new to the Montevideo local authority, most of which passed to major independent and the other customer CUTCSA on privatisation. Some of the 240 were still in use as late as 2001 including a 1951 EL40 in use as a driver trainer."

Edit: kind-of-answered simultaneously here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698064 while I was writing the question :)

"they picked one winner - Leyland - and force-merged them with all the losers"

calibraxis• 14 years ago

The US government picked winners like Intel, saving the US semiconductor industry through protectionist policies. (http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepinnacor.html) In fact, the US technology industry was developed through enormous subsidy, from transistors to the internet.

Economist Ha-Joon Chang discusses that's how powerful nations develop. The entrepreneurial Japanese government's first forays into the auto industry were failures, but of course they kept at it, learning from failure. That's the nature of investment, as any HN reader should know.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

I'm not quite sure why the government's choices back then would have any bearing on their choices 30 years later? It's not the same people. It's not even the same generation.

andrewmu• 14 years ago

I think many people are assuming this means direct investment but maintaining a high quality, accessible education system is arguably more important.

nl2• 14 years ago

Meh..

ARM only employs ~2000 people, not all of whom are in the UK. That's hardly a mass employer like the manufacturing sector is.

its_so_on4• 14 years ago

I don't need years of battery life: I need 32-36 hours (of use, not standby). Then I can go from charging daily, like in the nineteenth century where you have to wind your watch up every night, and Sherlock Homes can tell a watch belonged to a drunkard by scratches around where you insert the winding key; how different is it to fumble with the power adapter jack? - ahem, to charging whenever it is CONVENIENT for me. It still wouldn't quite last through a long weekend at a lodge with just one inconvenient power outlet if you use it a lot EVERY day, but most people don't and if you do, you still only have to find a quiet period to charge it ONCE during the long weekend, like whenever the social activity dies down.

How many people keep multiple chargers at the different places (home/office) they are, or even take one with them ALL the time, just so they don't get left stranded. All this is fixed if the machine has a longer cycle than you do, over a typical 1-2 day cycle. Then you can pick the most convenient time to charge up from 20 or 40 or 60 percent or wherever it's at by then, you can work on it it at a cafe without plugging it in after working somewhere else you couldn't plug it in the night before, or go away for the weekend with it without any charger at all, if you know you're back in the ofice Monday and are sure to use it less than that.

In the meantime you don't worry, you aren't inconvenienced.

stdbrouw• 14 years ago

But it's not because you don't need years that nobody else would. And it's not because you immediately link ARM to smartphones and music players that that's the only use for a power-efficient CPU. Think a little harder :-)

its_so_on4• 14 years ago

I was talking about my laptop. Terribly sorry I didn't make this clear, too late to edit! I mean that nobody even thinks of making a laptop with the battery life mentioned. For office tasks, who cares if it's an arm?

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

These chips are not going to be used in phones.

its_so_on4• 14 years ago

I was talking about my laptops -- terrible sorry this wasn't clear! I thought the cafe/home/office example made it clear. Who works all day on their phone?

onemoreact• 14 years ago

They might be used in phones, just not as the CPU/GPU. Think, flash memory controller etc.

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

I need years of battery life. Recharging means not being late for a charge cycle for 50+ years lest I suffer ventricular synchronization failure, and replacement means cutting a hole in my shoulder - both of which rather inconvenience me.

frobozz2• 14 years ago

This is not about being able to go for long periods without bothering to charge, but about energy usage, and being able to get a long period of actual usage from a machine without having to charge it from a reliable mains supply.

You do need years of battery life. Not by improving the capacity of batteries, but by improving the rate at which energy is drawn from them.

As the article quotes: "Every developed nation country has a graph showing electricity demand is going to outstrip supply at some point in the next 20 years unless we do something different,"

You are inconvenienced, just not in the manner you highlight.

hopeless• 14 years ago

How does a 1mm x 1mm chip actually get used? I'm guessing that the actual package would have to be much bigger to enable mounting on a board?

jws• 14 years ago

Generally the package is big enough to get all the connections out at a scale that won't irritate manufacturing.

There are tiny packages though, NXP (one of the ARM builders) has a 2mm x 2mm package with a similar ARM in it, but they can only get 16 pins out at that scale, 4 are power and ground, one is clock leaving you 11 pins to rule the world. (data sheet: http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC1102.pdf)

Tuna-Fish2• 14 years ago

These are not sold as physical chips, but as logic macros, where someone implementing a soc pastes this on with all the other stuff he wants. The total chip size will of course be bigger so that it can have pins.

dzhiurgis• 14 years ago

Pair it with bluetooth 4.0 ant implant inside my body. I will charge it myself once in a while using inductive charger.

gonzo• 14 years ago

Why not just use energy harvesting. You move & you're warm.

hinathan• 14 years ago

But the warmth isn't on a temperature gradient so it's difficult to exploit.

jfasi• 14 years ago

Well, strictly speaking the Cortex A9 is supposed to be 1mm x 1.5mm, but that's:

1. According to ARM's promotional materials. No corroboration from licensors, as far as I'm aware.

2. Without caches. If you look at those pretty pictures of Intel chips, those huge swatches of regular rectangular stuff are caches, and they take up space.

xxiao• 14 years ago

this is mostly for msp430 I feel, msp430 is 16-bit and kind of strange to deal with, I'm happy to see this M0+ coming along to replace that.

zxcvvcxz• 14 years ago

Quick question: under specs for the M0+ where they say,

>Enhanced Instructions >Hardware single-cycle (32x32) multiply option

Does that mean their hardware can multiply 32-bit by 32-bit numbers in a single clock cycle?? I took a computer organization course where I implemented a simple hardware multiplier and it took a lot more cycles than that, so I was curious.

abecedarius• 14 years ago

Probably means throughput, not latency.

omgtehlion• 14 years ago

You can create HW multiplier using only NOR+AND elements. It will consume a lot of silicon, but will work fast enough.

BTW, most FPGAs have HW multiplier prebuilt block, because you will loose lots of flip-flops or LUTs (or both) implementing one yourself.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

Arm unveils 1mm x 1mm 32bit chip: "years of battery life"

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