Ultra Low Power Microcontroller

Keisoku Giken Adopts GainSpan Embedded Wi-Fi Chips for "WattChecker-Tweet"

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 22, 2011) - GainSpan ® Corporation, a leading developer of ultra low power embedded Wi-Fi solutions , announced today that its ultra low power embedded Wi-Fi GS1011 chips are being used by Keisoku Giken Co., Ltd., for its recently released WattChecker-tweet , a power monitor that twitters your energy usage.

Keisoku Giken's WattChecker-tweet allows users to monitor, save and share their energy usage wirelessly. The device monitors and "tweets" the home's daily energy usage to a user's Twitter account. The user simply plugs their appliances into WattChecker Tweet and the device gives instant read-outs of power usage in Watt, electricity consumption over time in kWh and more. Energy consumption can be monitored from anywhere and at any time through a computer or Smartphone. The WattChecker-tweet will be initially available in Japan through retail distribution chains

"We decided to use GainSpan's low power Wi-Fi GS1011 chip for WattChecker tweet because of its ultra low power consumption, ease of integration and competitive price compared to other Wi-Fi solutions. These features make GainSpan's chip an extremely good fit for a Wi-Fi smart plug application," said Mr. Koichiro Takemura, Manager, PW Department, Keisoku Giken Co, Ltd.

GainSpan's GS1011 ultra low power Wi-Fi SoC is the lowest power Wi-Fi solution available in the industry today. It consumes just a few µA of standby current and has a wake-up latency of only a few ms. The Wi-Fi chip handles all Wi-Fi functionalities, networking and security stacks, accelerating wireless device development cycles.

"Keisoku Giken is an extremely innovative company and our collaboration with them has yielded very exciting results," said Bernard Aboussouan, vice president of marketing at GainSpan. "We see an increasing demand for Wi-Fi enabled energy management products and smart plugs. As opposed to devices using other competing technologies, Wi-Fi enabled devices leverage the home's existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, reducing the total cost of ownership. We're pleased to be able to provide Keisoku Giken with a quick and easy way to add Wi-Fi connectivity to exciting new products such as WattChecker-tweet."

About GainSpan GainSpan is a leading ultra-low power embedded Wi-Fi semiconductor solutions company focused on connecting Things to the Internet, and People to Things. With easy to use system-on-chip (SoC), modules and software, GainSpan enables customers to leverage the large installed base of Wi-Fi access points and devices to create new connected embedded products for healthcare, smart energy and control and monitoring in industrial, commercial and residential markets. GainSpan solutions feature an ultra low power SoC that consumes just a few µA of standby current and a few ms of wake-up latency, ideal for battery operated devices requiring long battery life. The Wi-Fi chip handles all Wi-Fi functionalities, networking and security stacks, offloading when required the host microcontroller and accelerating wireless device development cycles. Based in San Jose, CA, GainSpan has R&D in Bangalore, India. www.gainspan.

Design News - News - Ultra-Low Power MCU Uses Ferroelectric Memory

&Quot;It's going to allow you to put more sensors in more places and monitor more things," notes Miller Adair, MSP430 product marketing manager for Texas Instruments , maker of the new microcontroller. "The key is the fact that FRAM writes 100 times faster than Flash (memory) and gives you a 250-times power savings. So you can do significantly more things with the same battery than you could with a Flash controller." Known as the MSP430FR57xx , the new microcontroller is said to be the industry's first ultra-low power ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) 16-bit microcontroller. Texas Instruments has been working on FRAM technology for about a decade, but this is the first time that the memory has been integrated into a microcontroller. The new MCU is said to reduce the industry's best active power by up to 50 percent when executing code from FRAM, operating at 100 µA/MHz in active mode and 3 µA in real-time clock mode. It also offers virtually limitless write endurance at 100 trillion cycles. The blogs and comments posted on Design News do not reflect the views of Design News, UBM Electronics, or its sponsors. Design News, UBM Electronics, and its sponsors do not assume responsibility for any comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.