ONiO looks to kill the IoT battery with RISC-V microcontroller
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A Norwegian chip startup is aiming to eliminate the need for batteries in trillions of devices across the Internet of Things (IoT)
Kjetil Meisal, CEO of ONiO talks to Nick Flaherty about the company plans for its ‘self aware’ ultra low power RISC-V microcontroller powered purely by energy harvesting being shown at CES 2024 this week.
“We come from the Norwegian semiconductor legacy, from Atmel and Nordic Semiconductor,” Meisal (above) tells eeNews Europe. “We set out to make the changes that we saw were necessary in the semiconductor, rather than incremental development of existing IP for extremely low power.”
“There is a challenge in IoT that is the battery that limits the growth of the IoT and the sustainability and you really don’t need a battery if you design it for ultra low power. We looked at third party IP, of course you don’t want to redesign the wheel, but there was not the IP we need for low power.”
So the team set out to design an ultra low power microcontroller from scratch with all the peripherals on standard CMOS process technology with tools from Cadence Design Systems and open source tools.
The design uses a 32bit RISC-V core with custom instructions tailored to be extremely low power and built in energy harvesting, as well as scalable, configurable low power memory designed in house. A wireless front end supports Bluetooth Low Energy and IEEE802.15.4 radio on the first chip, with other protocols such as Matter being added for the first general release of the chip later in the year.
“Everything is tailored to very low power and we beat everyone by far,” said Meisal. ONiO has shared the cold start power consumption and sleep figures with eeNews Europe to support that claim but asked that they are not made public at this time. Meisal also will not comment on the process node being node, other than to say it is mainstream without needing a custom process development kit (PDK).“The partnerships with the PV companies confirm it, we are the only one that really removes the battery as there is a limitation in cold start or sleep power,” he said.
The company has been seed funded by SME Instrument, Innovation Norway, and Forskningsrådet in Norway as well as a development grant from the EU Horizon 2020 programme. It is now looking at its first major round of external funding following deals with indoor solar cell makers Powerfoyle and Epishine.
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“We have chosen a path where we have scalability with the production partner, but we have used all the tricks in the book, the whole system being power aware to different approaches on computation. Usually a microcontroller operates as quickly and then shuts down so we look at what is the optimal speed for the lowest power,” he said.
“The system is self aware an optimises itself all the time. We optimise the energy extraction with advanced MPPT, and we can support three to four sources, but its optimised for two. The obvious ones are RF and PV but we can also combine others. When we are operating from ambient energy we are not operating at the limit. RF is a very good backup as there is always a trickle of energy all the time.”
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The IP in the chip is designed for future licensing. “It’s a bit trickier as a small company to run a multi license IP model and have the ability to help anyone that breaks the IP, Its super easier to be run over by a larger companies, so we are doing a multiphase model,” said Meisal.
“We chose to sell chips but we structure our IP to have the capability to license the IP if that’s a future directions but we chose not to do that right now. Right now it’s about the integration.”
Exeger is using the microcontroller for a battery free remote control shown at the CES 2024 show this week. This is a naked PCB to show there is no battery.
“This means you can reduce the bill of material and remove the maintenance that is the battery so you get the long deployment, fit and forget sensors. That enables IoT to grow faster.”
This also makes the IoT systems more sustainable he says. As well as removing the battery, the entire system can be sealed as access is no longer needed. This then allows the use of more sustainable water-soluble printed circuit boards that are otherwise susceptible to humidity.
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The company has also developed a debug board can measure the power of every line of code to give feedback on the code with advice and examples. “You can imagine having a feedback loop for AI optimisation so it will become a very power tool when it is released in H2 2024,” he said.
“Right now we are working with some big customers and as we are completing the tools we are partnering with complementary technology companies to scale in the right way.”
The company has also focussed on the design in of the chip with an open source software tool on a sensor board. “We will have an open source design in 2024 where we have developed a whole flow so we can take the board and do a proof of concept in 15 minutes, adding a data dashboard that is running natively rather than on Linux,” he said.
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