Ambiq’s Apollo510 MCU is the first member of Ambiq’s new Apollo5 family of devices that, yet again, presents Ambiq’s most energy-efficient, highest-performance product to date. With a Cortex-M55 core running at up to 250 MHz at its heart – supporting up to 8 MACs per cycle with vector acceleration and FPU – and an unmatched ultra-low power consumption whether in active mode or deep-sleep mode, the Apollo5 improves on the already outstanding Apollo4 with:
- >4x the power efficiency
- 3-11x the performance for AI workloads
- 5-16x the performance for DSP workloads
- 3.9x better graphics performance
- 10x reduced latency
The Apollo510 enables this on-device AI performance without the need for a dedicated NPU, thanks to a well-designed processing architecture supported by 4 MB NVM, 3.75 MB SRAM, and 64 kB I & D caches (each). Ambiq also supports its AI-optimised neuralSPOT technology with several ready-to-go AI SDKs to get you started with using AI in common application areas, such as always-on voice recognition, audio enhancement, heart monitoring, sleep monitoring, and physical health monitoring.
Also integrating Ambiq’s secureSPOT platform with Arm TrustZone security, and a 2.5D GPU with vector graphics support and hardware acceleration for vibrant, crystal-clear user interfaces with smooth transitions, the Apollo510 provides engineers with the complete signal chain for truly taking endpoint AI to the next level, resulting in 10x the device performance on the same battery life:
sensing -> data pre-processing -> Inference -> operating system -> security -> graphics/UI -> data storage -> power management
The diagram above shows the internal architecture of the Apollo510 device, which features many peripheral interfaces to support your design, including:
- 2x SDIO/eMMC
- 4x UART at 2.5+ Mbps
- 4x MSPI (Hex @ 1.2/1.8V)
- 8x I2C & SPI masters
- USB 2.0 FS & HS w/ DMA
- 1x 2-channel digital & 1-channel low-power always-on analogue microphone interfaces
- 2x full-duplex I2S
Apollo510 integration is currently served by two package options:
- 6.6 x 6.6 mm 16×16 BGA (225 pins with 183 GPIOs)
- 4.91 x 4.68 mm 13×14 CSP (182 pins with 144 GPIOs)
Ambiq plans full market release of the Apollo510 devices in Q4 2024, with initial sampling to select customers currently in place. It anticipates the greatest benefits of its ultra-low-power, high-performance devices in applications such as wearables, medical devices, AR/VR glasses, industrial automation, predictive maintenance, consumer and infrastructure IoT, and smart agriculture.
Evaluation boards in line with the previous Apollo generations will be available when the Apollo5 family is ready for mass production, so if you have an interest in boosting the performance of your battery operated device by ten times – and integrating AI – fill out the form below, and ipXchange will get you connected with Ambiq to be among the first to experience this next level of innovation.
