Andes N8 High Performance, Low Power and Low Cost Helps Hycon 24-bit ADC’s Competitiveness in the Health Care Device Market

Andes Technology Corporation today announced that Hycon Technology Corporation, based in Taipei City Taiwan, selected the Andes high performance, low gate count, low power architecture  N8 32-bit processor core for Hycon’s next generation high-end 24-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC).  The Andes core helps Hycon’s higher resolution 24-bit ADC achieve a competitive advantage in the demanding and rapid growth health care device market of digital scales, blood pressure and insulin monitors, wearables, and other devices that monitor chronic medical conditions outside the hospital.

“Andes Technology provided Hycon with on-time and effective technical support and service that ensured our design team’s schedule was maintained as we integrated the Andes core into our new 24-bit ADC design,” Hsu Wen-Yee, Senior Director at Hycon Technology said, “and their excellent support helped reduce our time to market. While Andes is a newer CPU IP supplier in the industry, the company’s strong and continued insistence on self-discipline, growth, eagerness to listen to customers, and continuous hardware and software improvements makes them a partner worthy to engage with in the long term.”

“We are extremely pleased that Hycon chose the Andes N8 processor core for their next generation 24-bit ADC product,” said Frankwell Lin, President of Andes. “In the field of healthcare applications such as glucose meter, digital weight scale, temperature sensor, etc., Hycon has achieved international tier-1 status in terms of quality and performance.  In the future, Andes will continue to devote ourselves to providing excellent products and superior technical service to all our customers.  By creating a win-win business engagement with our customers, we can grow together and help one another succeed.”

About the Medical Electronics Market 

“The growing $85-$90 billion  Medical electronics market is being driven by a change in health care models away from reactionary care where chronically ill patients require expensive hospital treatment to a more preventative model using modern technology,” said Stephen Holloway Associate Director, Medical Devices, IHS Technology of El Segundo, Calif.  “The new opportunities of digital technology is to take patients out of the hospital into the home setting.  And use things like smart networks, cloud computing, to be able to monitor those patients remotely. That’s really driving some significant demand for new systems and technology in medical.”

About the N8 CPU Core

SoC designs for IoT devices demand low cost and low power consumption in combination with high performance to handle compute intensive functions such as processing sensor data and wireless protocol stacks. The efficient AndeStar™  Instruction Set Architecture enables superior 32-bit performance with lower power consumption than and gate-count equivalent to an older 8-bit processor. The three-stage pipelined N8 works with separate flash acceleration IP called  FlashFetch that boosts performance without consuming added power. The key component of FlashFetch consists of a small amount of buffer near the processor core that enables repetitive functions to be executed efficiently thus eliminating power consuming flash memory accesses

A three-stage variant of the N8, the S8, features the AndeStar V3m architecture with Security Extension Micro Profile, which enables a secure microcomputer core with code and data protection from physical attacks and password-protected debugging.  Another variant of the N8 core, called E8, is equipped with the unique  Andes Custom Extension (ACE).  The E8 enables designers to create custom instructions that differentiate their designs from competitive offerings that are based on standard instruction set processors. By adding special instructions, not easily discoverable by hackers, ACE can provide even stronger security to a design.  The E8 also delivers 1.82 DMIPS per MHz of performance, while consuming far less power than 32-bit competitive alternatives.