If they get enough eval boards out at decent prices, and the SDK is halfway usable then it would appear some of the lessons from Espressif are being learned.
One demo shows a drone flight controller - but any drone has enough motors and actuators to render the power consumption of the MCU irrelevant.
The operating voltage is a flex, but I'm pretty sure no battery chemistry goes this low while retaining a lot of usable power in it. No power harvesting on board, no RF on board, no integrated buck converter. Which doesn't bode well for sensor uses either.
It's cool that an IC this low power, one that can run on voltage this low, is even possible to make. But it looks like a proof of concept piece more than anything.
Lower power consumption for the brain-box that controls things always means smaller mass, and/or longer flight time. These are both admirable goals, and it is good to take these advancements where we can get them. Even if the improvements may seem like low-hanging fruit, they do accumulate.
> The operating voltage is a flex, but I'm pretty sure no battery chemistry goes this low while retaining a lot of usable power in it.
Supercapacitors are neat. They're capacitors, so they're really good at being charged and discharged many many times. But one of the things that keeps supercaps from being more broadly used is that they can have a good bit of power remaining in them even when their voltage is too low to directly power electronics, which reduces their maximum utilization (and by extension increases their size and expense in application).
This chip is stated to work at voltages as low as 0.4 volts.
This seems like a fine fit for a solar-powered sensor with fairly simple power management that is powered through the night by a supercap. And by avoiding the issues inherent with common chemical batteries, it may be possible for the sensor-widget to have a lifespan that is measured in decades.
> No power harvesting on board, no RF on board, no integrated buck converter.
It's just an MCU (though they do call it an SoC). Lots and lots of useful MCUs that are out there in the real world don't include these functions on-die. That's OK, isn't it?
(Besides, the UP201 is at the first released rev. The featureset is allowed to expand as time progresses. We walk before we run. If the company doesn't go belly-up, I'm sure it will include a kitchen sink and mail reader in due course.)
> Lots and lots of useful MCUs that are out there in the real world don't include these functions on-die. That's OK, isn't it?
No. It's embedded, and chips live and die by integration. You either get really good at being an easy to develop general purpose jack of all trades solution, or you get into a lucrative niche and design everything for the niche.
This appears to do neither. It's a specialized piece, but it's not specialized enough. It suggests some very specific applications, but doesn't deliver on being suited to them. Tech demo material.
Wouldn't it be simpler to initialise at a higher voltage and then bring down the voltage after stabilisation? Unless of course the errors are always occurring?
