Surecore's Low Power Memory Delivers Improved Power Efficiency For BLE-Enabled Devices

November 2, 2022 -- The popularity of wearable devices has seen an explosion of market entrants all vying to deliver a better user experience with a richer feature set than their competitors. 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 expert, 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 market-leading power profiles so urgently needed by these applications. These include Everon™, PowerMiser™, and MiniMiser™. Further details can be found at on sureCore’s product page. 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 significantly easing system level design considerations.

For those developers seeking to deliver genuinely market leading 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.

sureCore™ – When low power is paramount™

sureCore, the ultra-low power, embedded memory specialist, is the low-power innovator who empowers the IC design community to meet aggressive power budgets through a portfolio of ultra-low power memory design services and standard IP products. sureCore’s low-power engineering methodologies and design flows meet the most exacting memory requirements with a comprehensive product and design services portfolio that create clear market differentiation for customers. The company’s low-power product line encompasses a range of close to near-threshold, silicon proven, process-independent SRAM IP.