In wearables and hearables, low power is king. Earbuds for example still only manage a half-day active use before we need to recharge. Half a day falls short of truly convenient for most of us – a full day would be much better, allowing for overnight recharge. Physics limits battery sizes so system designers must look to SoC architectures to reduce power further. BLE is the obvious choice for communication with a nearby phone or other device but is a minimum requirement; further extending battery life requires more ingenuity. Some will come from cleverness in software running on an MCU or DSP, managing sensing, audio, automatic noise reduction and gesture recognition. However one significant opportunity is often overlooked – power reduction through application-specific SRAMs. Full article on SemiWiki