Apple M7

The Apple M7 is a coprocessor for sensor data acquisition of the U.S. company Apple Inc. It can capture and process data from various motion sensors of a mobile device power saving and independently of a main CPU.

Function

The M7 can capture, edit and cache, even if there is a complete device in low-power idle state, the data from the motion sensors. User programs can later query the data. Thus, the average power consumption is reduced and the battery life.

With the data preparation, information on the type of motion are determined, such as walking, running or driving.

Technology

The chip, code-named Oscar is working with an ARM Cortex- M3 CPU. It is based on a microcontroller of the Dutch semiconductor manufacturer NXP Semiconductors and is called LPC18A1.

Use in Apple devices

The processor comes in Apple's smartphone iPhone 5s, the iPad Air and the iPad mini 2 is used, where it accounts for a large part of sensor data acquisition and processing for the Apple A7 CPU.

For this unit, he was fitted with a custom BGA package with 30 terminals, and an appropriate name. The smartphone uses an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a compass, which are connected to the M7.

Applications communicate via a so-called core of the operating system API motion IOS 7 with the chip. This allows, for example, fitness apps to be able to understand and track the user's movements.

Relevance

With the introduction of the A7 SoCs Apple applied for the first time that another chip on the logic board of an iOS device. Even before the introduction of the M7 iOS devices had been installed motion coprocessors, such as since the first iPhone for a tilt sensor, since iPhone 3GS for a magnetometer and since the iPhone 4 for a gyroscope. The control processors of these sensors were not, however, on one chip and have not had the opportunity as the M7 in the standby of the iPhone data in the background to collect and load the CPU. Compared with other chips in addition to the Samsung SoCs M7 is of minor relevance for the correct operation of the iPhone. The Infineon baseband processor, for example, which is responsible for telephony and the Internet connection, surpasses the M7 in complexity and chip size by far and is due to its function after the SoC is the most important chip in a iOS device with a modem.