8 bit uController with Lowest power consumption ?

picoavr

Hi all,

Been searching for a 8 bit or 16bit microcontroller with the lowest power consumption possible. Any recommendation? I am looking for those with at least 10 GPIO. My intention is to power the uC using a 3000mAh battery for maybe 5 years...? Is this possible? The uController may be in normal mode at most 4 hours a day and the remaining in sleep mode...

Thanks for any infor provided.... If there are no such a low powered uC,any battery that can provide a higher mAh?

Have a good day.

chicken_feet

this will help you
http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/picopower/Default.asp

Have a look at:
https://www.microchip.com/ParamChartSearch/chart.aspx?branchID=103&mid=10&lang=en&pageId=74

There are a couple of small footprint chips, with ultra low power wake up feature. Also, you can have free samples of those.

Cheers,

check new low pin count, ultra low power series from Texas Intstruments MSP430F20XX.. but these are 16 bit controllers....

**broken link removed**

you may want to take a look at the Super Low Power (SLP) Family from Renesas. It supports various operating modes, and even module standby to conserve power.

Hi,

the MSP430 is king of the court if it comes to low power. I doubt your 4h / day normal operation mode. If you tell us a little bit more about your application we could provide some more useful hints.
For example if you interface to a person and need to pretend to be always on, you can go more than 99% of the time into deep power down mode or how ever it might be called. You can be awake for 1 ms every 100 ms and do quite a bit of computing but only taking 1% of your active power consumption. This works if you have a good enough internal oscillator because external oscillators need a while (serveral ms) to wake up. This is just one hint and as I have looked into low power from many different angles may be I can help you.
btw. 5 years are 1826 days. 4h each day makes 7304h operation. Running from a 3000mAh battery for more than 7000h is very difficult in active mode. Obviously your active mode is not very active ;-)
Just to add another candidate to the race, you could use a LPC900 from Philips (not as good as the MSP430 but cheaper) and run on the internal watchdog oscillator. With 4h "pseudo-active" as described above, you would end up with realistically less than 100h active mode about 44000h in some sort of sleep mode. Any value around 1 uA for such a sleep mode would get you 44 mAs for the accumulated sleep mode and let's say the active mode is 10mA another 1000 mAs for being active.
Keep in mind that most of your power will actually be consumed by self-discharge of the battery, depending what technology is used.

So, enough for today, I hope this helps and gives you an idea what to look out for.

Bob

hi all,

Thank all for your links and advice. Thanks Bob, will keep your advice in mind. Your reminders on the calculation necessary for battery discharge and also for sleep mode is greatly appreciated.

By the way, what are the advised batteries for these sort of applications? For battery application like this, is it a usual practice that the power from battery are not regulated? I have checked on one 3.6 Volt Lithium Thionyl Chloride that has a 8.5Ah and it stated that it has a high terminal voltage. What is terminal voltage suppose to mean?

Lastly, can i assume that the battery will still provide the same voltage level as it is used througout the years?

Thanks all and have a good day ahead.

chicken_feet

Added after 3 hours 15 minutes:

Hi nikhilele,

I am afraid the pico Power AVR is not out in the market yet. If based on what they claims, the pico power AVR will easily beat MSP430. Anyway, thanks for your infor.

Best rgds,
chicken_feet

You can find some additional information about batteries e.g. Li-Ion here:
**broken link removed**

The voltage will vary quite a bit during the full discharge cycle but Li-Ion has good characteristics.

btw. the number for MSP430 are still better than those for the upcoming pico AVR. If I could not do the zero power brownout, I would also look for reasons why it is not a good idea ;-)

Bob

Hi Bob,

Good morning. Just to clarify your last sentence. So you are saying that one of the reason why MSP430 stood out was because of the Zero power Brown Out Detector? And if the Pico Power technology offers the same characteristics, you would seriously consider using it? Is that what you mean?

Anyway, still waiting for the reply from Atmel on the availability of the Pico Power products while gathering for the power consumption on the Microchip Nanowatt Technology and the Renesas Super Low Power Tiny uC. The problem is that, you can only get a general listing of the current consumption and most of the time with different parameters (speed, Vcc level ). Anyway, will list out all these again on this list when I finally get hold of all the details in summary form.

Thanks again Bob and others. Good day ahead.

Best rgds,
chicken_feet