Energy Micro announces world's most energy efficient microcontroller

Oslo, Norway -- October 22, 2009 - Energy Micro, the energy friendly microcontroller company, today announced the availability of its first products, the 32-bit EFM32 Gecko microcontroller family. Based on the ultra-efficient ARM® Cortex™-M3 microcontroller architecture, the EFM32G has been proven to extend battery life by a factor of four, consuming a quarter of the energy required by existing 8, 16 or 32-bit microcontrollers.

Proven to consume less than 180µA per MHz while executing real life code from Flash, the EFM32G achieves 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. Furthermore, the microcontroller’s start-up time of less than 2µs is the industry’s fastest.

"We are very proud that we have delivered on our mission to provide the world with the most energy friendly microcontrollers," said Geir Forre, founder and CEO. "By introducing innovative new energy saving features, such as our peripheral reflex system and energy management unit, the potential saving in battery life that can be achieved is immense. Competing solutions just can’t match the EFM32G’s performance."

Ian Drew, the executive vice president of marketing at ARM adds, "ARM’s main focus is to provide the world with the most energy efficient microcontroller architectures. We believe that the world’s most energy efficient microcontrollers are based on the Cortex-M architecture and we are delighted with its adoption by Energy Micro. It is a good day for MCUs."

Specific highlights in the EFM32G’s rich feature set contributing to its ultra low energy consumption include: a 4x40 segment LCD controller running at less than 900nA; an 8-channel 12-bit 1M samples/sec ADC running at less than 200µA; a brown-out detector running at less than 100nA; a 32kHz real time counter running at 50nA; and a UART capable of 9600bps at 100nA. The EFM32G family of microcontrollers has been specified in close partnership with many world leading companies within, for example, the energy metering, home and building automation and alarm and security industries," said Øyvind Janbu, co-founder and CTO of Energy Micro. "Working so closely with top engineers in such sectors has enabled us to produce a family of microcontrollers that truly is a perfect fit for a variety of different applications."

Bjarne Ravndal Andreasen, R&D manager at VELUX A/S, one of Energy Micro’s partner customers and one of the strongest brands in the global building materials and home improvement industry said, "VELUX is constantly looking for ways to extend the battery life of our products and when Energy Micro revealed their low energy ambitions to us we decided to engage in a close collaboration with them. As well as the attraction of extremely low energy consumption we recognised that the EFM32 products could be used in a broad variety of VELUX electronic products."

Anders Skallebak, R&D manager at Kamstrup A/S, the very first Energy Micro partner customer and one of the leading European energy metering companies said, "Kamstrup engaged in collaboration with Energy Micro even before the company had finalised the initial specification of the products. Based on previous experience of working with this team in their first start-up, Chipcon, and due to the large energy savings we could make on our battery operated meters we decided to engage with Energy Micro 18-months ago. The first Kamstrup products containing EFM32 are likely to reach the market in 2010."

22 different EFM32G microcontroller products will become available over the next few months, in a variety of packages including QFN32, QFN64, QFP100 and BGA112. The EFM32G operates from a single supply rail of between 1.8 and 3.8V. The operating temperature range is –40degC to +85degC. The microcontrollers provide up to 128KB Flash memory and up to 16KB of RAM.

The first products are being offered by Energy Micro in QFN64 and BGA112 profiles and are currently sampling with lead customers. Pricing for the initial 32-pin devices starts at $1.55 in 100k quantities.