Silicon Labs is working with ARM to advance the low-power ARM mbed IoT device platform

     Silicon Labs, a leading provider of microcontrollers, sensors and wireless connectivity solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced a partnership with ARM to define and release the first power management application programming interface (API) for the ARM mbed platform. Adding a power management API to mbed will bring improved energy efficiency to standards-based solutions, further optimizing ultra-low-power, battery-powered connectable devices. The new API will enable the more than 100,000 registered members of the mbed Forum to optimize their MBED-enabled ARM Cortex-M architecture designs for optimal energy efficiency and longer battery life.

     In addition to enabling developers to manage the state of processors and peripherals, the mbed power management API is designed with low-energy applications in real-world environments in mind. A new feature of the Silicon Labs EFM32 Gecko microcontroller (MCU) is the ability to automatically determine and implement the best sleep mode based on the MCU peripherals in use, which significantly reduces system-level power consumption. Low power optimization can be achieved by running I/O operations in the background, or by continuing I/O operations while the MCU core is in sleep mode or working on other tasks.

     Through the automatic selection of optimal sleep mode, combined with low-power autonomous MCU peripherals, developers can significantly reduce energy consumption in their IoT application designs with minimal effort. Taking a common IoT device use case as an example, in an application energy analysis that updates the clock display once per second on a memory LCD, current consumption can be reduced from 1.03mA to 0.100mA.

     Zach Shelby, vice president of IoT Business Marketing at ARM, said: "The new ARM mbed power management API enables developers to build applications that take full advantage of the low power consumption of ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. This is an important step toward fully power-aware IoT devices, and it is one of the key building blocks in the mbed OS that will be publicly released later this year."

     Daniel Cooley, vice president and general manager of MCU and Wireless products at Silicon Labs, said: "As a pioneer in low-power processing solutions in the IoT space, Silicon Labs and ARM have made great strides in defining and releasing mbed's new power management API. We are excited to help launch the industry's first low-power mbed platform, which will play a key role in accelerating the deployment of countless battery-powered IoT applications."