Energy Micro licenses Cortex-M3 for controller attack

LONDON — Energy Micro AS (Oslo, Norway) has signed a license to use the Cortex-M3 processor core from processor IP licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England). The company has also licensed physical IP from the ARM Artisan physical IP family, plus a number of ARM PrimeCell peripheral IP blocks.

The company said it plans to use the licenses to introduce its first ultra low-power 32-bit microcontroller family, based on the Cortex-M3 processor core, in the second quarter of 2009.

Energy Micro is a fabless chip company formed in 2007 by Geir Forre, president and CEO, who was co-founder and CEO of Chipcon Group AS, the RF and ZigBee company acquired by Texas Instruments for $200 million in January 2006. Energy Micro's declared aim is to develop microcontrollers with the lowest power consumption based modern processor architectures.

Texas Instruments reportedly took Forre to court late in 2007 alleging that he had been trying to recruit Texas Instruments staff in contravention of terms and conditions laid down at the time of the Chipcon acquisition.

The forthcoming microcontroller family has been dubbed EnergetIC and Energy Micro said it would offer energy consumption at a level far below today's microcontrollers, thus enabling improvements in battery life, longer lifetime of electronic products and reduced disposals. The low power consumption would be achieved by a combination of an efficient active processing mode, a range of power saving modes and a flexible set of system peripherals.

"With our focus on low energy consumption, integration, system performance and low cost, the ARM Cortex-M3 processor is the right choice for us," said Forre, CEO of Energy Micro, in a statement. "The strong ecosystem of available tools, software and knowledge within the ARM Connected Community is also very important for us and our customers."