Semiconductor Engineering: Designing For Extreme Low Power

Most IoT edge devices are basically fairly similar. “The chip basically has sensing, processing and communication,” says Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP. “There is usually one sensor, or multiple sensors attached to it. These things are polling or communicating periodically. They usually have a part of the chip that they call ‘always on’, even though it’s not always on. It’s doing the communications and checking to see if there’s anything from a sensor. Compared to a mobile phone, or some AI chips or an ADAS chip, these chips are not huge. These are really tiny chips, but the power management within them is really complex.”