The MCU marketplace is crowded and competitive, with semiconductor companies globally increasing R&D spend in this technology area; this market is forecast to reach ~$20B USD in 2019.

This continued growth stems from the need for dedicated controllers for the IoT and mobile devices; consumers want to use their devices more and recharge them less. The latest wave of MCU solutions deliver by consuming less power and increasing battery operation times.

Ambiq’s latest ultra-low power MCU, the Apollo 3 Blue, caught our attention. This SoC, fabricated on TSMC’s 40 nm eFlash LP process, includes a new direct memory access (DMA) engine and TurboSPOT burst mode, which brings the ARM core to 96Mhz while lowering active power to less than 6uA/Mhz.

TechInsights has begun our analysis on this part, and we have several reports planned, including standard cell analysis and circuit extraction.