ZeroWatt Technologies was founded in 2009 to provide analog and mixed signal solutions featuring the industry’s lowest power consumption. The company was co-founded by two research scientists from University of California, Irvine. Early development of the core technology took place at the Nanoscale Communications Integrated Circuits (NCIC) laboratory at UC Irvine.

The core technology has evolved into the patent-pending Analog Compression Engine (ACETM), which serves as a building block for a number of applications including data converters, amplifiers, microcontrollers and sensors. This patent pending technology, when applied to converter circuits, dramatically reduces power consumption at the component level and system-wide.

ACE incorporates three techniques to extract signal information that is used to lower power consumption based on the level of signal activity. Efficient Signal Digitization reduces power consumption by up to 5x and provides the best possible tradeoff between speed, resolution and power. Adaptive Power Optimization automatically adjusts power consumption based on signal activity. System-level Power Reduction shares signal intelligence with other system components such as microcontrollers and DSPs, further reducing system-level power consumption.

Traditional ADCs “blindly” digitize the entire analog signal’s full amplitude scale and full frequency spectrum, without any consideration to what the signal type or statistics are. As a result, the conversion process wastes power. In contrast, ACE technology automatically tracks, adapts, and learns the incoming signal. It then autonomously adjusts its power consumption according to the signal needs on a sample-by-sample basis. By intelligently analyzing the signal behavior and processing only the useful signal, ACE significantly reduces power consumption, up to 5x in certain applications, without any degradation in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the conversion rate.

ACE also features new techniques for Event Detection and System Power Reduction. Unlike known methods of waking the DSP or MCU based on simple amplitude thresholding, ACE enables detection of events within signals based on complex amplitude, frequency, patterned, and statistical information. Because ACE ADCs adaptively digitize the analog signal based on the signal’s instantaneous movement, it gains a great deal of intelligence on tracking and learning the analog signal. This intelligence is then reused to perform detection of events within the signal. As a result, very little power is expended on gaining signal intelligence.

Using ACE technology, ZeroWatt has already built multiple generations of ADCs that consume significantly less power compared to other similar products on the market. The ZW1010, the first device incorporating ACE technology, was used primarily to validate the core capabilities of the ACE technology.

With the second generation ZW1020, ZeroWatt has successfully demonstrated two key benefits of ACE technology, up to 5x lower power compared to similar devices from major industry players and the ability to lower power consumption based on signal activity. The ZW1020 has a resolution of 10 bits and a speed of 5 MS/sec. In general, ACE-based products are targeted to operate within resolutions of < 18 bits, < 20 MS/s, typically dissipate power in the range of 1 mW at 12 bits and run at speeds of 5 MS/s.

The third generation ZW1030 demonstrates the system-level power management capabilities of ACE technology by adding event detector and DSP_on decision logic. When used in applications that incorporate a microcontroller or a DSP, the ZW1030 lowers system-level power consumption by up to 7x.

ZeroWatt ACE technology is available as a building block that can be integrated with other functions such as microcontrollers, DSPs, SoCs, FPGA/PLD, or Analog Front-End solutions. ACE technology is particularly well suited to power-constrained applications that have low duty cycle signals (e.g. remote monitoring sensors), bursty signals (e.g. ultrasound, surveillance), oversampled signals (e.g. high resolution medical devices), high peak-to-average signals (e.g. acoustics) and narrowband signals (e.g. communications).

Vipul Mehta , President & CEO (previously held executive positions with large public companies and has co-founded and built technology start-ups. Among the companies Vipul has worked with include Aristos Logic, Adaptec, Western Digital and Xerox.)

Dr. Fred Tzeng , co-founder & CTO (Previously worked at GE and Qualcomm; received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine)

Prof. Payam Heydari, co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer (Full Professor of Electrical Engineering at UC Irvine and director of the Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuit Laboratory)