Ultra-Low Voltage Microcontrollers

To leverage the design strategy presented in Chap. 3 to its full capability, this chapter implements a state-of-the-art microcontroller system. The main goal is to provide a proof-of-concept implementation on an industry-proven design to showcase the efficacy of the mentioned strategy, as well as achieve excellent energy and speed performance. The ARM Cortex-M0 core is chosen to this end. It is used in a variety of commercial systems going from IoT nodes (Sparkfun, NEST: Nest Thermostat Teardown. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/nest-thermostat-teardown- (2016); TechInsights, Fitbit: Fitbit Charge 2 Teardown. http://www.techinsights.com/about-techinsights/overview/blog/fitbit-charge-2-teardown/) to virtual reality (VR) glasses (IFixit, Oculus-VR: Oculus Rift CV1 Teardown - iFixit. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+CV1+Teardown/60612, 2016). The core is ideally suited for energy-constrained applications, so it has been a recurrent topic in low voltage literature as well.