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. 

The Semico Spin
In a few years, IoT will be ubiquitous, with an extremely large number of applications. In addition to the processors and memory at the heart of the applications, a wide variety of enabling chips will be required. Atmosic Technologies’ inaugural M2 and M3 series is one of those. It should be attractive to anyone with a battery-powered IoT application.