David Su's last job was vice president of analog and radio frequency engineering at Qualcomm, and before that he spent more than a decade at Atheros Communications. That was where he met David Nakahira and Masoud Zargari, two of the original members on the Atheros engineering team. Qualcomm hired them all following its 2011 acquisition of Atheros, and all three left within months of each other in 2016.
“而且我们还没有彼此讨厌，” Su告诉电子设计。
此后，SU已接任Atmosic Technologies首席执行官，这是他与Nakahira和Zargari创立的初创公司。该公司计划首先出售蓝牙5芯片，以用于需要长时间发送少量数据的应用，而不会通过一次性电池燃烧。具体而言，该初创公司是针对可穿戴设备，信标，键盘和其他通常通信的设备。
Atmosic技术said that its CMOS-based SoCs consume 10 times less power than anything else available on the market. That allows them to run indefinitely on an energy harvester that can completely replace batteries in factory and consumer electronics using Bluetooth. Unit shipments of Bluetooth chips used in Internet of Things endpoints are projected to grow from 680 million units to 1.54 billion in 2021, according to ABI Research.
“我们从干净的板岩开始，”苏说。“我们仔细地经过了每个RF块” - 调制解调器和无线前端 - “即使没有一定大小的解决方案，我们也能够通过电路级技术将功耗降低了十倍。透明该公司将不得不与主要的蓝牙芯片供应商竞争，包括德州仪器，赛普拉斯，对话和北欧半导体。
The company is using other strategies to curtail system power. The new devices are capable of on-demand wakeup, which allows the transmitter to remain in sleep mode while listening for wireless signals from other devices that wake it up. “Most lower power devices do not need to be communicating all of the time,” Su said. “Most of the time they are in standby mode. So we asked if we could make a standby mode that consumes almost no power.”
功率要求是如此之最小，以至于芯片可以用收获的RF能量供电。但是，这些芯片没有收获环境能量，而是需要专用的电源，例如嵌入灯泡中的无线发射器。Atmosic Technologies表示，只要其能量收集天线可以产生单位毫米，只要它保持足够接近电源，效率为30％至40％，不包括RF路径损失。
Using energy harvesting, the new chips can send information at one megabit-per-second while consuming around the same amount of power as near-field communications (NFC). Another benefit is longer range than NFC, which can only cover about 20 centimeters. Not every electronic device using Bluetooth needs to send large amounts of data, so reducing the data rate allows them to send messages further.
总部位于加利福尼亚州圣何塞的Atsosic正在针对应用程序，例如可穿戴设备，只需要定期将数据传输到其他设备，例如智能手机。这些芯片也可以嵌入用于工厂和建筑物中用于室内定位和资产跟踪的蓝牙信标中。它们也可以用来启用网络网络，其中设备与网络中最接近的设备进行通信，以在广泛区域中传输消息。
到2022年，这些应用程序预计将占蓝牙设备销售的30％，而不包括智能手机和个人计算机。ABI研究分析师Andrew Zignani说：“维持这种依赖电池的设备的时间和金钱可能会限制连接的物联网的潜力。
自从2016年成立以来，该公司已从Sutter Hill Ventures，Clear Ventures和Walden International筹集了2100万美元的风险投资资金。他们的芯片（其中包括Internalth Internation Harvester，另一个没有筹码）目前可作为样品作为样品。根据业务发展副总裁Srinivas Pattamatta的数据，这两种产品均预计将在2019年第二季度进行数量产量。
