News Article
PNI gives smartphone OEMs low power "˜sensor hub'
PNI Sensor (PNI), a developer of magnetic sensing and sensor fusion technologies, has announced SENtral-K, the first ultra-low power "˜sensor hub' to support all Android 4.4 KitKat sensors.
SENtral-K embeds the complete range of KitKat sensors on its low-power SENtral coprocessor, allowing smartphone original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to support always-on context-aware applications such as Google Now. "Android 4.4 KitKat sensors - which Google calls "˜sensors.h' - are not traditional hardware sensors," says Becky Oh, president and CEO, PNI Sensor Corp. &rldquo. Rather they specify common outputs for fused and raw sensor data from MEMS inertial sensors such as gyros and accelerometers. Step Detect/Count, Linear Acceleration and Significant Motion are examples of sensors.h sensor features that you would want to always have running in the background without draining precious battery. "SENtral-K is ideally suited to Android 4.4 KitKat designs because it was built from the ground up for low power," explains Oh. "As a coprocessor that functions like a sensor-agnostic "˜sensor hub,' SENtral-K gives designers the flexibility to choose the most power-efficient sensors from a range of suppliers. It is also the only chip that can run all KitKat sensors simultaneously for under 200 µAmps." SENtral-K supports all Android 4.4 KitKat sensors.h, including: 9 degrees of freedom(DOF) (3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyro plus 3-axis magnetometer) 6DOF (accelerometer plus gyro or accelerometer plus magnetometer) Gravity Linear Acceleration Step Detect/Count Significant Motion Calibrated Sensor Competitive solutions come in two forms: microcontroller (MCU)-based sensor hubs running third-party KitKat sensor algorithms licensed from specialised software companies and MEMS sensors that run the bulk of the KitKat sensor algorithms on the mobile device's app processor. SENtral offers a single solution with both the enabling hardware and software for KitKat and "˜always-on' operation of the highest-performance motion, context and location algorithms. In direct benchmarking against Flash-based sensor hub MCUs with on board floating point units (FPU), SENtral-K operates at less than ten times the power. SENtral-K can routinely run over 140,000 floating point operations per second at about 200 µA average current consumption in real use (at 1.8V), which is unlike anything else in the market today. SENtral gives designers the best of both worlds: it's KitKat-compliant with a portfolio of best of breed algorithms for context- and location-awareness embedded on a tiny, ultra-low power sensor hub. This frees designers from integration worries, gives them the flexibility to choose their own sensors and conserves precious power. And best of all, SENtral-K costs about what a very stripped down Cortex M0 would, with no additional licensing fees for use of the embedded algorithms.
