Ambiq is a company founded in 2010 on the simple but powerful notion that extremely low-power semiconductors are the key to the future of electronics. Ambiq has developed breakthrough technology based on its patented Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT) platform to reduce the amount of power consumed by semiconductors, thus making integrated circuits (ICs) an ideal solution for energy-critical applications. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Ambiq Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Carlos Morales to learn more.
Carlos Morales’ Background
Carlos Morales has more than 30 years of research and development experience from silicon to cloud. During his career, Morales has held architecture, development, management, and business development roles at multiple technology companies, ranging from large multinationals to pioneering silicon startups.
His team’s mission at Ambiq is to utilize SPOT to take Endpoint AI to the farthest reaches of edge computing. Morales joined the company from Intel, where he ran the AI Product Group’s global AI software organization and led AI strategy and business development initiatives. Before joining Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel), Morales was part of Cisco’s Advanced Architecture and Research group, where he pioneered novel technologies such as Fog Computing and the first full-featured software-defined router.
Idea Behind Ambiq
Ambiq specializes in ultra-low power system-on-chips (SoCs) designed to make intelligent battery-powered endpoint solutions a reality. And these days, nearly every endpoint device incorporates AI features, including anomaly detection, speech-driven user interfaces, audio event detection and classification, and health monitoring.
Ambiq’s ultra-low power and high-performance platforms are ideal for implementing this class of AI features, and the Ambiq team is dedicated to making implementation as easy as possible by offering developer-centric toolkits, software libraries, and reference models to accelerate AI feature development.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): What has been your favorite memory while working for Ambiq?
Carlos Morales (Ambiq): One of the first things I did at Ambiq was running MLPerf Tiny (an industry-standard AI benchmark suite) on our Apollo4 Plus SoC. When I saw the power and performance results, I thought I’d dropped a zero somewhere – they were far lower than I expected. I spent the rest of the day double-checking my math, and when I convinced myself the numbers were correct, I got up, hugged my wife, and told her joining Ambiq was the best decision I’d ever made.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): What challenges have you faced while building Ambiq, and has the current macroeconomic climate affected it?
Carlos Morales (Ambiq): Performing AI at the endpoint, whether a wrist or a factory floor, has many benefits over the usual approach of sending the data back to a data center for processing. We all know the frustration of asking your watch to set a timer only to fail because of connectivity issues. Despite the additional friction in sending all AI to the cloud, cloud-based AI providers have set the price low enough to offset the inconvenience to the end user. While these cloud-based services operate at a loss, recent market pressures on CSPs to improve margins will probably raise the cost, further increasing the value of endpoint AI.
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): What are Ambiq’s core products and features?
Carlos Morales (Ambiq): Ambiq’s core products include complete ultra-low power SoC solutions in tiny form factors for IoT endpoint devices. Built on Ambiq’s SPOT platform, the Apollo family of SoCs provides the most power-efficient processing solutions in the market. Optimized in active and sleep modes, the Apollo processors deliver an ultra-long lifetime and higher performance for Wi-Fi-connected, battery-powered wearables, hearables, remote controls, Bluetooth speakers, and portable and mobile IoT devices.”
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): How has Ambiq’s technology evolved since launching?
Carlos Morales (Ambiq): Ambiq’s products built on our SPOT platform will reduce the total system power consumption on the order of nanoamps for all battery-powered endpoint devices. Over the years, we’ve successfully continued to improve the energy efficiency and power consumption of our SoCs to effectively process sensor data to run on-device inferencing and mimic human intelligence. Furthermore, we’ve leveraged SPOT to unleash the true potential of IoT endpoint devices with exceptional battery life. We are now in the fourth generation of Apollo SoC with multiple derivatives targeting segments, including wearables, hearables, smart home, industrial IoT, healthcare-related products, and asset trackers.”
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): What has been one of Ambiq’s most significant milestones?
Carlos Morales (Ambiq): Ambiq sold over 200 million devices at the beginning of 2023 with close to 80% market share of the wearables.
Customer Success Story
Recently, the company did joint marketing promotions with two leading wearable brands in China – OPPO and Xiaomi.
OPPO
OPPO and Ambiq jointly optimized the energy efficiency of the Apollo4s platform to maximize the performance and battery life of the OPPO Watch 2. With the Apollo4s, OPPO Watch 2 delivers robust performance, faster response time, and more significant operating fluency, ensuring battery life.
Xiaomi
Xiaomi – one of the world’s leading consumer electronics and smart manufacturing companies – and Ambiq, a recognized technology leader in ultra-low power system on chips (SoCs) and real-time clocks (RTCs), announced earlier this year the collaborative global launch of Redmi Watch 3. This smartwatch offers Bluetooth phone capability, supports five major satellite positioning systems, and can operate for up to 12 days on a single charge. The Watch 3 also boasts an impressive 1.75 AMOLED display and includes a geomagnetic sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, blood oxygen sensor, heart rate sensor, activity, sleep tracking, more than 120 sports modes, and 24-hour security protection. The new Xiaomi smartwatch is powered with Ambiq’s Apollo4 Plus SoC, delivering energy efficiency and robust security. With a built-in graphics processing unit (GPU) and a high-performing display driver, Apollo4 Plus provides stunning user interface (UI) effects, speedy processing capability, audio solutions, and a superb user experience – all in a safer and more secure environment.
Revenue/Growth
Ambiq has doubled its revenues each year since 2017. While the macro-economy has weakened in 2022 and 2023, Ambiq has continued global growth. The company’s number of employees has expanded from 80 at the end of 2019 to over 250 today.
Future Company Goals
Amit Chowdhry (Pulse 2.0): What are some of Ambiq’s future company goals?
Carlos Morales (Ambiq): Since our founding in 2010, we have not wavered from our original mission: to enable intelligent devices everywhere by making the lowest-power semiconductor solutions to help facilitate a more energy-efficient, sustainable, and data-driven world.
