SAN JOSE, Calif. – Ambiq Micro Inc. (Westlake Hills, Texas) has announced the introduction to the market of the AM08XX and AM18XX real-time clock (RTC) chips, which the company claims are the world's lowest power RTC chips. The typical active current is between 15 and 55 nanoamperes, Ambiq said.
The chips are intended to help control power-sensitive applications such as real-time backup, wireless sensors, tags, smart cards and security tokens, utility meters, dataloggers and handsets.
The AM08XX product family is a functionally diverse RTC family that replaces existing, more power-hungry RTC products. Variants of the AM08XX product family are footprint compatible with popular RTC products currently on the market and cover SOIC-8 and QFN-16 package types and I2C and SPI serial communications options and varieties of on-chip SRAM up to 256-bytes. The AM18XX product family includes all functions in the AM08XX family but also includes power management functionality that enables system-level power savings.
The AM18XX-EVK evaluation kit, which provides access to all input and output signals on the RTC, comes in the form of a motherboard that connects to a PC through a USB cable.
Ambiq did not provide a price for the ICs or the evaluation kit or state whether it is able to supply in volume.
Ambiq entered the Silicon 60,
EE Times' list of emerging startup companies at version 12.5 in April 2011, which is the subject of a detailed technology and employment digital edition which can be accessed via
http://e.ubmelectronics.com/Silicon60/index.htmlRelated links and articles:
www.ambiqmicro.com
News articles:
ARM, Cisco, others back MCU startup
Top ten MCU articles for 2011
Startup says its silicon oscillator beats crystals, MEMS 
Previous：
Next ：