Date: 25/05/2021

Extreme low power capabilities connect Winbond and Ambiq' chips

Winbond and Ambiq are supporting each other's latest products through collaboration. IOT designers can connect Winbond's HyperRAM and Ambiq's Apollo4 in their extreme low-power IoT endpoints and wearable designs. There are already good number of customers starting volume production of products in 2022, designed usingAmbiq's Apollo4 SoC and Winbond 256Mbx8 HyperRAM Hybrid Sleep Mode (HSM). Winbond says power consumption of its HSM is about 50%, compared to normal standby mode making it suitable for IoT endpoints and wearable to extend more battery life.

AI powered and battery-power dependent IoT market seeing a good growth particularly in the field of smart home and smart manufacturing and processing. Ambiq uses its patented technology called Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT) in its latest Apollo4 family of SoCs and the complete hardware and software solution is built to allow battery-powered endpoint devices to deliver high processing power with longer battery life. Using low-power memory devices such as HyperRAM with Apollo4 delivers low power advantage and allow for faster delivery of high-resolution graphics to improve the performance.

"As the IoT market rapidly expands with the proliferation of diverse mobile and portable devices, how to deliver the most desirable user experience becomes the holy grail for manufacturers. Built on Ambiq's patented Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT) platform, the Apollo4 delivers higher performance at ultra-low power consumption," said Dan Cermak, VP of Architecture and Product Planning at Ambiq. "Leveraging Winbond's HyperRAM to enable expanded storage to support high-resolution displays and complex AI datasets, we can deliver low-power solutions while maintaining low pin count for smaller form-factor endpoint devices."

"The convergence of AI and IoT (AIoT) requires intelligence, low power consumption, and faster processing of graphics, data, and user interfaces," said Winbond. "By bringing together HyperRAM™ and Apollo4, we are setting a new benchmark in ultra-low power and simplifying the design of intelligent devices for our joint customers."

HyperRAM Key Features as shared by windbond:

256Mb HyperRAM operation frequency: 200MHz/250MHz
256Mb 30 ball WLCSP: 13 signal pads for x8 and 22 signal pads for x16
Available in a variety of form factors of AIoT end product, including 24BGA, WLCSP, and KGD
Sizes available from 32Mb to 256Mb