sureCore’s low power memory delivers power efficiency for BLE-enabled devices

The challenge for product designers is to balance this growing feature set with form-factor limited battery lives. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless interface has dramatically cut power consumption for many applications, although its ubiquity has once again raised the stakes among developers by pushing them to reconsider a range of design trade-offs that can squeeze yet more operating life between re-charges.

One key area now being prioritised is the on-chip embedded SRAM. This has been growing in line with the feature set and is now a significant contributor to system power demand. Selecting off-the-shelf SRAM, which is often not optimised for power, does nothing to drive power efficiency. sureCore, the low power memory specialist, is encouraging designers to consider the power profile of their embedded memory needs and look to both low voltage and low dynamic power solutions.

Paul Wells, sureCore’s founder and CEO explained: “Designers of power sensitive products have already made the shift to Bluetooth Low Energy from Classic Bluetooth as this uses a fraction of the power. However, few realise that using our ultra-low power embedded memory IP can offer similar significant reductions in power of up to 50%. These wearable designs integrate a lot of memory to support all the sophisticated features and that plays an important part in the overall system power budget. Halving the memory power consumption can make all the difference to realising a competitive recharge cycle”

Wells added that China is a powerhouse for wearable designs with multiple licensees already using its ultra-low memory IP for a wide range of products from health and fitness monitoring to smartwatches and from earbuds to edge-AI.

sureCore has a range of power-optimised, standard products that deliver power profiles needed by these applications. These include Everon, PowerMiser, and MiniMiser.

Power savings can be realised both at nominal operating voltages and, increasingly importantly, at low to near threshold voltages allowing the application designers to tailor the power profile to the performance requirements. sureCore memories offer single rail, low voltage operation thereby allowing direct logic connection and hence significantly easing system level design considerations.

For those developers seeking to deliver power performance, sureCore, as part of its bespoke custom memory development service, sureFIT, delivers memory sub-system solutions optimised for the three-dimensional design space of Power, Performance and Area (PPA). Such a solution provides the opportunity to engineer the optimal memory implementation for the target application.