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Wearable technologies suffer from a major problem: the size and capacity of their batteries. For customers, small batteries mean recharging the device often. For product manufactures, it's a challenge to make a long-lasting device that consumers want to use. Austin-based Ambiq Micro plans to change all that.
Today the company announced it raised $15 million in a Series C funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and with participation from earlier investors. The money will speed up the development and marketing of its SPOT™ (Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology) platform.
The official version is a mouthful, but the concept is easy to grasp: find a way to reduce the energy needed to power devices so that batteries don’t slow down innovation.
Bypassing the Bottleneck of Innovation
According to the company, battery technology improves only incrementally and isn’t keeping pace with other technological breakthroughs. Consumers want wearable technologies, which require small batteries and are often running constantly. The tradeoffs between battery life and battery size require frequent re-charging of the device, annoying the customer and making the product less user-friendly. Ambiq Micro's solution is to bypass the battery and make the device need less energy in the first place. Smaller power usage means smaller batteries or longer-lasting devices.
By lowering the threshold of energy needed to power a device, Ambiq Micro can offer its customers a dramatic increase in usability of its product – and that’s for anything with a microprocessor (think smartphones, watches, computers, anything to do with the Internet of Things). For the end user, it means a better product that uses less energy and thus, needs to be plugged in less.
Ambiq Micro accomplishes this by altering the voltage level (where switching happens inside semiconductor chips to reduce overall energy consumption of the semiconductor). The idea has clearly generated interest; the $15 million Series C round follows a smaller $10 million round in August of last year.
“Low energy consumption has replaced performance as the foremost challenge in electronic design,” Ambiq Micro’s VP of marketing Mike Salad wrote on the company’s blog.
The Internet of Things
The company plans to announce a new product, a microcontroller family (MCU), in the next few weeks. The technology can be deployed for wearable electronic devices, ensuring those devices will have longer battery lives than their current state.
Orders for wearable devices (industry-wide) are expected to double this year to 22 million devices. By tapping into that market, and making devices that can last longer and use significantly less energy, Ambiq Micro could alter the technology landscape.
