MIPS supports 12mm² low-power IoT & wearables chip

15th May 2015

Barney Scott

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Datasheet

Samsung president Young Sohn was at the recent IoT World conference in San Francisco to introduce a family of low-power chips designed for next-gen IoT devices. One of the chips presented on stage, ARTIK 1, features a MIPS32-based, dual-core application processor, flash storage, a crypto engine and Bluetooth Smart radios for communication.

The Samsung ARTIK 1 chip is designed for wearable and IoT devices. Delving into the underlying architecture of the CPU cluster, we find two MIPS microAptiv processors: one configured for high-performance workloads and clocked at 250MHz, and a low-power variant at 80MHz. The modified diagram below highlights the two MIPS microAptiv CPUs at the heart of the ARTIK 1 chip:

ARTIK 1 has the world’s smallest form factor (12mm²) in its class, according to Samsung. Aimed especially at power-sensitive devices, ARTIK 1 provides weeks of use on a single charge. Its hardware includes a 9-axis motion sensor with gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer, as well as BLE connectivity. With a feature set tailored for wearables and IoT end nodes, ARTIK 1 is a mobile workhorse.

Ticking inside the ARTIK 1 chip, microAptiv is part of the Aptiv family and implements a five-stage pipeline architecture, as shown in the diagram below. MicroAptiv UP features a cache controller and a Memory Management Unit (MMU) for embedded systems that run rich OSs. MicroAptiv UC includes a Memory Protection Unit (MPU) for fast execution of RTOSs.

Samsung also used the event to present plans for a complete datacentre-to-device software infrastructure designed around security. microAptiv features a secure debug interface which ensures a high level of security, and can provide added hardware-assisted safety for the main AP.

MIPS microAptiv CPUs are based on an elegant RISC architecture which achieves better performance at lower frequencies and in a smaller area compared to competing solutions. For embedded and MCU-type applications, MIPS microAptiv offers class-leading performance: 1.7 DMIPS/MHz and 3.6 CoreMark/MHz.

Application developers will also benefit from a significant boost in DSP operations such as voice processing, since microAptiv offers up to 2.56 times higher DSP performance than the competition.

Finally, microAptiv CPUs support microMIPS, a code compression ISA designed to reduce memory requirements for embedded systems.

Arduino IDE, Samsung SDK and C/C++ development environments are provided for ARTIK1.