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ENERGY MICRO: Product of the Year 2010!

ENERGY MICRO has received the prestigious Product of the Year 2010 Award from Germany’s leading bi-weekly technical journal, Elektronik. Voted for by the readers of the magazine, ENERGY MICRO's EFM®32 Gecko microcontroller was the winner in the active devices award category.

EFM32 Gecko microcontroller family delivers 4x increase in battery life

Norwegian start-up Energy Micro launched its first product, the ARM® Cortex™-M3 based EFM32 Gecko microcontroller family in October 2009. Consuming less than a quarter of the energy needed by alternative 8-, 16- or 32-bit microcontrollers the product is regarded as the world’s most energy friendly microcontroller.

Proven to consume less than 180µA per MHz while executing real life code from Flash, the EFM32G achieves the lowest active mode current consumption of any microcontroller. Its standby current consumption is also the lowest, at typically 900nA while running real time clock, power-on reset, brown-out detector and full RAM and CPU retention and less than 20nA in its deepest sleep mode. Furthermore, the microcontroller’s start-up time of less than 2µs is the industry’s fastest.

Specific highlights in the EFM32G’s rich feature set contributing to its ultra low energy consumption include: a 4x40 segment LCD controller running at less than 550nA; an 8-channel 12-bit 1M samples/sec ADC running at less than 200µA; a brown-out detector running at less than 100nA; a 32kHz real time counter running at 50nA; and a UART capable of 9600bps at 100nA. The EFM32G family of microcontrollers has been specified in close partnership with many world leading companies within, for example, the energy metering, home and building automation and alarm and security industries," said Øyvind Janbu, co-founder and CTO of Energy Micro. "Working so closely with top engineers in such sectors has enabled us to produce a family of microcontrollers that truly is a perfect fit for a variety of different applications."

22 different EFM32G microcontroller products will become available over the next few months, in a variety of packages including QFN32, QFN64, QFP100 and BGA112. The EFM32G operates from a single supply rail of between 1.8 and 3.8V. The operating temperature range is –40degC to +85degC. The microcontrollers provide up to 128KB Flash memory and up to 16KB of RAM.

Here you can find the latest pictures from the awards show.