Nanopower looks to chipscale power management
Nanopower in Norway is planning a chip-scale version of its power controller for wearable and implantable medical devices.
The nPZero power controller is currently in a 32pin 5 x 5mm QFN package but the size of the package is an issue as the device sits between a microcontroller and up to four peripherals or sensors to manage the power of the system.
The company is designing a chipscale version that measures 2.5 x 2mm.
The nPZero has several state machines running in parallel with its sub-threshold design as one of the techniques to reduce the power consumption. “We are closer to a smartcard where you send information to the RAM and we execute from RAM to run the state machines,” said William Xavier, chief technology officer of Nanopower tells eeNews Europe. It is launching an development board at the Embedded World exhibition in Nuremberg, Germany, this week.
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“There are MCUs with low power but these are at least 10 to 20 times more power as these still need to boot in normal mode and bring it back to sleep mode and this take time and power.”
This is currently built with foundry UMC. “We are using a bigger node 180nm with sub-threshold as the lower nodes have gate leakage.”
“We are using UMC with EuropePractice with the multi-project wafers but we are testing X-fab. We are doing the characterisation of the PDK as no one has sub-threshold and we are fine tuning our models as we run at 0.6, 0.7V.”
“We are working on the next generation design to support more than four peripherals, as we are limited by the number of state machines. We have a work around to put a lot more than four on the chip but our limit is only the size of the SRAM as we need to hold the peripheral registers, so the limit is the size of the memory.”
The company is also working on a smaller version for a single peripheral.
“Not for this year but there are some people that need less peripherals, a tiny, die on die on a sensor binning,” said Xavier. “We flip chip this onto the sensor and it’s a simple architecture for building a SIP with everything embedded.”
The company has 22 people and is ramping up for production and distribution with a new VP of sales and partnerships.
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