At the 2025 Hot Chips Conference, Everactive released an ultra-low power consumption self-supply system single chip (SoC). Everactive’s PKS3000 chips, which can power themselves using the energy collected in the environment, operate without a stable...
At the 2025 Hot Chips Conference, Everactive released an ultra-low power consumption self-supply system single chip (SoC). Everactive’s PKS3000 chips, which can power themselves using the energy collected in the environment, operate without a stable power supply, are seen as a key solution for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployment and global energy sustainability challenges.
In the past, traditional Internet deployments, once the equipment was connected or battery replacement was required, would complex the equipment quantity expansion and duplication, especially when these sensors were in difficult contact positions. Therefore, from a sustainability perspective, utilizing environmental energy is one of the ways to provide power sources for these devices. Moreover, another advantage is that it will not be affected by network failures. However, relying on energy harvesting brings serious challenges. For example, the energy collected is usually within a range of milliwatts or microwatts and will fluctuate according to environmental conditions. This forces the SoC to run at extremely low power while taking measures to maximize the energy collected and survive under suboptimal conditions.
Everactive's newly launched PKS3000 chip uses an ultra-low power consumption process of 55 nanometers, with only 6.7 square meters of wafer surface. The design purpose is to collect and transmit data under strict self-power supply constraints. Especially in the processing core aspect, the wafer contains an Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller. The Cortex M0+ is one of the lowest power consumption cores of Arm and is equipped with simple circuit lines. Its memory subsystem is also simple, including 128 KB SRAM and 256 KB flash memory, without built-in cache, instructions and data access share a memory port.
According to the experiment, the PKS3000 can operate at 5MHz, with only 12 microwatts of operating power consumption and 2.19 microwatts of idle power consumption. This power consumption is one level lower than the milliwatt level that is paid attention to by a mobile device. It can be connected to various sensors to collect data, and is equipped with power-optimized Wi-Fi/Blue teeth/5G wireless for data transmission. It is worth noting that the significantly improved part of the PKS3000 compared to Everactive's previous PKS2001 chips is that the idle power consumption has dropped from 30 microwatts to 2.19 microwatts, the operating power consumption has dropped from 89.1 microwatts to 12 microwatts, and the process has been upgraded from 65 nanometers to 55 nanometers, and many of them have been improved from architecture technology.
As for the core objective of the PKS3000 is to collect energy, which is then controlled by the Energy Collection Power Management Unit (EH-PMU). Its energy harvesting sources include collection through solar batteries, collection through thermal generators, or other potential energy sources, including wireless emissions, mechanical vibrations or gas flows, which can be configured according to expected environmental conditions. Thanks to the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) technology, EH-PMUs helps to obtain energy from each collection source with optimal voltage, further improving collection efficiency.
However, because the collected energy is not stable, the PKS3000 can store energy in a pair of capacitors to provide deep energy storage to ensure that the chip can continue to operate under bad conditions. The smaller capacitor can charge quickly, speeding up the cooling start speed after the voltage drops. The PKS3000 can even be started with a PV/TEG combination at 60 lux and 8°C for indoor lighting in cold rooms. In addition, the EH-PMU supplies power to four output trucks (1p8, 1p2, 0p9 and adj), and the bad conditions can be switched to power supply from stored capacitor energy.
Everactive also introduces the power management of the PKS3000, which is responsible for the Energy Sensing Subsystem (EAS), similar to Intel's Power Control Unit (PCU) or AMD's System Management Unit (SMU). Energy collection, storage and consumption are monitored through EAS to develop power management decisions. It manages frequency and voltage adjustments through a range of different policies, and the firmware can be connected to the EAS to set the maximum frequency and power management policy. Energy statistics can be used to determine when to enable components or perform OTA updates.
In the past, self-supplying chip communication was a huge challenge, because even if wireless power only keeps the network connected, the power consumption may be high. Therefore, Everactive solves this problem by using Wake-up Wireless (WRX). WRX uses an always-on receiver and can receive partial messages with extremely low power consumption. Compared with traditional wireless power using duty cycles, wake receivers strive to reduce the power consumption wasteful for idle monitoring while achieving lower latency. WRX shares an antenna with external communication receivers. Its sourceless paths operate at a frequency range of 300 MHz to 3 GHz, and the frequency selections are matched by the board to match the network, which can support multiple standards.
In comparison, although the Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 achieves similar sensitivity, the idle power consumption in core power reduction mode is 1.6 milliwatts, which increases to 3.4 milliwatts when associated with the 2.4 GHz access point. Everactive's WRX settings consume significantly lower power, again highlighting the strict constraints faced by self-powered operations. Everactive believes that industry standards are moving towards using wake-up wireless.
Everactive emphasizes that PKS3000 is a model of extreme energy measures. Because under the current AI craze, power consumption has caused concern for perpetuality. However, Everactive focuses on industrial monitoring applications, and its self-supply diesels consume a few levels of power less than PC chips or AI giant wafers even under load. Although the PKS3000 does not use cutting-edge FinFET nodes, it can complete tasks with extremely low power consumption. From the perspective of perpetuity, battery-free self-powered SoCs are of great value. As technology grows, the industry expects energy-harvesting SoCs to cover more extensive use cases and may even use modern node process to expand their capabilities.
