Cortex-M0 Gets Nearer to Near Threshold

Peter Clarke, Electronics360
July 3, 2014

Intellectual property licensor ARM continues to make progress on the near-threshold voltage operation of processor cores in research but it will be down tp ARM licensees to implement Cortex-M0 cores for such low voltage operation, according to Mike Muller, chief technology officer, of ARM Holdings plc.

Muller was speaking in a "Google Hangout" interview with Anand Lal Shimpi, the founder of a computing and consumer electronics review website called Anandtech, when he said that no new processor core would be required for near-threshold voltage operation.

ARM (Cambridge, England) is a licensor of processor cores for mobile phones, tablet computers and embedded applications. But the Internet of Things is widely expected to require an order of magnitude or more improvement in the energy efficiency although many of the computational work loads may be relatively light and demand infrequent. Reducing the voltage to close to, or even below the threshold voltage where transistors turn on and significant current flows is one way to achieve that ultra low power.

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