Murata, a leading Japanese electronic supplier, recently demonstrated its low power wi-fi smart speaker reference design using a small smart home model at the IoT/M2M show in Japan. Using the Murata remote control, users could issue a command such as “Please turn on the 1st floor light.” The smart speaker would then control the house lighting accordingly.

Two versions of the design were implemented – one with QuickLogic’s EOS™ S3 Platform and one without. The power difference for each speaker was shown on the left and right power bar of the remote control. The smart speaker implemented with QuickLogic’s EOS S3 was shown on the left side. With the EOS S3, the Murata Wi-Fi could be put into a sleep mode and then “awakened” by the user’s voice. That approach saved a lot of power (extending battery life) and the left side power bar on the remote showed the low power consumption which resulted. The right-side power bar showed how the Murata Wi-Fi without an integrated EOS S3 device was forced to run constantly in full “awake” mode, thus consuming a lot of power.

To make implementation of this smart speaker super easy, Murata has produced a reference design which combines their market-leading Wi-Fi module with QuickLogic’s EOS S3 SoC. This approach gives the smart speaker always-listening capabilities for any trigger word or phrase chosen by the OEM while consuming a miniscule 100uW of power. The reference design can be customized by the OEM for a wide range of applications using QuickLogic’s software development tools which provide full design support for the myriad other features and capabilities included with the EOS S3 platform.