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Morry Marshall's blog

Low-Power Atmosic Technologies' Bluetooth 5.0 Chip

Many IoT (Internet of Things) applications will be untethered, not connected by physical wires for power or communications. They will use batteries, and battery life will be critical. Atmosic Technologies, a Bay Area startup of ultra-low power wireless for the IoT, has developed a chip ideally suited for these applications. 

This week, Atmosic Technologies launched the M2 and M3 series, touting it as the industry’s lowest-power wireless Bluetooth 5.0 chips. It offers improved battery life in three ways. First, the chip was designed from the ground up to be a low-power chip. It has intrinsic design features that offer five to 10 times more battery life than other Bluetooth 5.0 chips. Second, it has on-demand receiving. The chip can be in a sleep mode until it receives a Bluetooth signal including specific codes to wake it up. That feature can improve battery life by up to 100 times. Third, it includes an RF Power Harvesting Section. By harvesting RF energy, the chip offers what can be essentially infinite battery life. The chip can use any of these three methods of battery life improvement on its own or in any combination. 

Mature Technology: It's Where the Action Is

Semico Research has just released a mature technology market research study.  Wait!  Mature technologies?  Aren’t those fabs trailing-edge technology, old hat, passé?  They may use older technology, but there’s a lot of action there now. 

For many years, semiconductor manufacturing has tended to migrate from older fabs to newer fabs in a predictable manner.  Leading-edge semiconductors such as processors and memory migrated to leading-edge fabs.  ASICs and other integrated circuits migrated to the second-generation fabs just vacated by the leading-edge parts.  Discretes and other trailing-edge devices migrated to the third-generation fabs.  Older fabs were decommissioned.  That pattern ended several generations ago.  The reasons are complex.  It involves economics, diverging memory and logic technologies, new applications which require low power, and market dynamics which include company consolidation.

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