Norwegian chip design OniO has raised €5m to ramp up production of its ultra low power RISC-V microcontroller.
ONiO.zero is the first general-purpose microcontroller that starts from cold from under 1µW, allowing it to run entirely on ambient energy from solar, RF or thermal energy.
The chip integrates a radio, power management, security and memory around a controller core using the open RISC-V instruction set that has been customised for low power operation. Customers have working prototypes and pilot products using the chip in solar keyboards, electronic shelf labels, air quality sensors, asset trackers, and soil sensors monitoring crops.
