Toward non-CPU activity in low-power MCU-Based measurement systems

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis article evaluates the benefits of having peripheral-triggered peripherals in a microcontroller unit (MCU) intended for low-power sensor applications. In such an architecture, the functionality is moved from the central processing unit (CPU) to the peripherals so that a peripheral is able to trigger another peripheral with non-CPU intervention. For the sensor data logging application under study, both energy consumption and measuring time are reduced by a factor of 2 with respect to the case of applying an interrupt-based approach that requires the CPU intervention.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Experimental study on the power consumption of timers embedded into microcontrollers

An experimental study on the current consumption of timers embedded into microcontrollers is presented in this work. The study is carried out in two commercial microcontrollers (MSP430FR5969 and ATtiny2313) and the experimental results are co mpared with the scarce data provided in their datasheets. The sensitivity (expressed in ¿A/MHz) reported in the datasheet seems to be only applicable if the frequency divider of the timer equals one. Otherwise, such a sensitivity is lower but there is a significant offset component, leading to a higher power consumption at the same operating frequency. The knowledge extracted from this work is expected to provide guidelines to better use embedded timers in low-power sensor applicationsPostprint (updated version