The new chip from Atmel can work on a single charge "for decades"

The Internet of things has penetrated so far into the tapes of technical publications that they are already joking at it . Atmel believes that they managed to create an element for future tiny sensors, wearable devices and disposable electronics. Their new Smart SAM L21 microcontroller based on the ARM Cortex-M0 + can operate on a single charge for more than ten years. 35 microamperes per megahertz allow it to be fed even from the heat of the human body.

According to Andreas Eyland, most of the cost-effective microcontrollers for current consumption are at the level of 120-160 microamps per megahertz of computing power. According to the ULPbench tool of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) Consortium, L21 is the most economical microcontroller, outperforming the STM32L4 by 50 percent.


Eyland demonstrates that the energy of the heat of a hot mug or human hand, converted by a thermoelectric generator, is enough to power and operate the Cortex-M0 + chip. The microcontroller performs modulation of the music file for the alarm-radio.

The chip requires 35 microamps per megahertz clock frequency during operation, while in simple consumption it drops to a value of 200 nanoampers for the entire microcircuit.
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To achieve these tiny indicators, it took processing of many elements, for example, the chip adapts to different levels of activity, aggressively turning off some circuits. In the L21 microcontroller, the Cortex M0 + core is installed - the smallest 32-bit ARM processor. Cortex M0 + is a cut-down version of M0, from which some elements have been removed to reduce energy consumption. There is also up to 256 kilobytes of flash memory, up to 32 kilobytes of static RAM, and up to 8 kilobytes of independent low-cost static RAM. The latter works even in the deepest idle mode, when many other microcontroller units are disabled.

Of course, the computing power is not enough to run a full-fledged desktop operating system or even to operate a smart clock, but the memory and processor are enough to perform several tasks, process data from several physical interfaces, process data from a USB device or other external storage.

Due to various tricks and the use of proprietary technology picoPower, the power consumption of the L21 is so low that this microcontroller will work on a single charge of the battery for decades.

Atmel offers kits for L21- based developers, these are SAML21 Xplained Pro boards for rapid prototyping. So far, neither the price of the L21 chip nor the process technology of the microcircuit is called.