“Power efficiency is critical for many emerging applications,” commented Rich Wawrzyniak, Senior Market Analyst with Semico Research. “More and more SOCs are being designed with subsystems that solve a larger part of the design challenge. By introducing a lower-power solution, Andes is servicing an increasingly important market need.”

The AE210P provides flexible and diverse configurations, giving customers the options to select and tune peripheral IPs for meeting their unique design requirements.

For example, if cost is the highest consideration, designers can choose the simplified bus structure of a single APB to support basic peripheral IPs, with a gate count as low as 11K. When pursuing the optimum performance and the best throughput, they can have an AHB bus matrix plus the APB bus.

In terms of peripheral IPs, the AE210P allows versatile combination from DMA controller, PWM, watchdog timer, Real Time Clock (RTC), UART controller, SPI controller, I2C Controller and bus controllers for AHB master/slave and APB.

These bus controllers, bridge controllers and peripheral IPs are all designed to maximize the system performance and minimize the access latency, logic gate count, power consumption and cost. With the AE210P already silicon-proven, customers can confidently integrate their modules through the provided interfaces and focus on their part of the designs. This also dramatically boosts the efficiency and quality in product development and shortens time-to-market.

“32-bit MCU products are penetrating the consumer market at a frantic pace,” remarked Dr. Charlie Su, Chief Technical Officer and Senior VP of R&D at Andes.

“The AE210P provides a pre-verified and pre-integrated platform IP that contains common functions required for many MCU applications – with reduced power. Using the standard TSMC 90nm LP library, the AE210P can deliver frequencies up to 200 MHz for high-performance applications, while power consumption can be as little as 98uW (82uA) for low power mode.”

“This makes it an ideal platform for IoT and wearable devices that demand ultra-low-power consumption for long battery life. The AE210P also enables customers to meet efficiency requirements and speed up their development process. These benefits are easily demonstrated by its access acceleration for NOR Flash, a typical memory among various MCU applications. It not only offers Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) for direct program execution from Serial Flash, but also employs the FlashFetch technology to accelerate the access time from Parallel Flash.”

Dr. Su further states, “Using the AE210P, customers can complete their SoC designs with ease by integrating their modules with the platform, greatly shortening the development time. For developers with strong needs for SoC optimization, the AE210P also allows configuration for respective peripheral IP. Such flexibility provides significant benefits for companies moving from 8- or 16-bit MCUs to 32-bit MCUs.”

The combination of the AE210P with AndesCore CPU IPs is fully supported by the AndeSight IDE and BSP components like toolchains, demo applications and real-time operating systems such as FreeRTOS, ThreadX, and uc/OS-II. As a softcore platform, the AE210P fits in any semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Andes also provides an FPGA development board for performance evaluation and software development too. All in all, the AE210P plays a key role in Andes’ 32-bit MCU total solution covering hardware, software and two-wire ICE debugger. For suppliers of MCU applications and system manufacturers, it is integral to create competitive products with optimum performance and reduced cost.

"Our ThreadX RTOS is an ideal match for the power-conscious AE210P, with our small memory footprint and highly efficient code," commented William E. Lamie, President of Express Logic, Inc.

"ThreadX is used in over 2 billion electronic products in the areas of consumer electronics, medical devices, and industrial control equipment. ThreadX supports IoT development for wearable and portable devices based on the AE210P, that require efficient, high-performance, and easy-to-use operation."