Hi There,
I’m looking for a super low power AVR. Not having luck with their website. They don’t seem to list the current during run mode in any of their tables. This must be somewhere. Microchip has that column.
I only have 400uA at 1.8V to run the MCU and some other stuff that takes about 100uA. So I have ~300 budgeted for the MCU. Any recomendations or help finding the table of AVR chips I can sort on by power usage?
Thanks!
Have you checked out, or queried folks on the forum at avrfeaks.net?
Does it always need to be in active mode? If your sleeping 90% of the time then I don’t think it will be too much of a problem.
I think an ATtiny with picoPower is the best bet: http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/defau … ily_id=607
I don’t know of any table they have that would list things like current consumption. I figure it would be unanimous across each of their product lines when configured correctly.
russpatterson:
I’m looking for a super low power AVR. Not having luck with their website. They don’t seem to list the current during run mode in any of their tables. This must be somewhere. Microchip has that column.
The datasheets all have that info; seems pretty easy to find to me. If you’re asking how to select the lowest power devices, have a look for the devices described as having “picopower technology” on this page:
http://atmel.com/dyn/products/devices_m … id=607#791
(Quite amusing that Atmel came out with “picopower” after Microchip announced “nanowatt” technology…)
Thanks for all the replies. Yeah, I doubt that Microchip will respond with “femto watt” technology.
Microchip now has nanoWatt XLP (eXtreme Low Power) technology:
I’ve found that the actual power usage varies from what’s claimed in the datasheets but as far as that goes it looks like Microchip claims to have lower power solutions.
I’ve played with one or two of those XLP chips, but haven’t checked the claims for myself. Measuring currents as low as 20 nA isn’t easy.
They all seem to claim (in their own way) that they have the lowest power. I think other chips (such as TI's 16-bit MSP430) are generally considered to have a lower power-per-MIPs than either PIC or AVR...russpatterson:
I’ve found that the actual power usage varies from what’s claimed in the datasheets but as far as that goes it looks like Microchip claims to have lower power solutions.
That was once true, years ago, before the ""nanoWatt XLP"" and "PicoPower" buzzwords.russpatterson:
I think other chips (such as TI’s 16-bit MSP430) are generally considered to have a lower power-per-MIPs than either PIC or AVR…
The [“Innovative Techniques for Extremely Low Power Consumption with 8-bit Microcontrollers” white paper claims that the ATmega165P uses less power than the MSP430.
In particular, when sleeping with a 32 kHz wake-up timer running at 2.2 V and 25 C, the MSP430 typically uses 0.80 uA, which is really quite amazing, but the ATmega165P uses slightly less power at a typical 0.65 uA.
the Microchip [“Extreme Low Power Microcontrollers” claim to do even better: “Real-time Clock/Calendar down to 500 nA”.
With your power budget, you could power about 600 of these chips – as long as all of them were sleeping :-).
To answer the original poster’s question:
If you really want to know which Atmel AVR has the absolute lowest current in run mode, I’m afraid you’re going to have to get a list of all the PicoPower devices available, download a datasheet for each one, and copy-and-paste numbers into your own spreadsheet.
(Looking through the [Atmel AVR Parametric Product Table gives me about 20 picopower parts – they either have “p” in their name, or are marked “picopower: yes”.)
Please tell us if you find a less tedious technique.
I’m considering using a ATmega328P on my next project, simply because there’s a huge library of Arduino code for it. (Although I would prefer one with enough SRAM to support PyMite).
According to the datasheet on p. 315, the ATmega328P typically requires (at 25 C): (I’m guessing all these numbers are with the ADC turned off)
1700 uA at 3V when actively running at 4 MHz
300 uA at 2V when actively running at 1 MHz
300 uA at 3V when idle but the 4 MHz clock is running
40 uA at 2V when idle but the 1 MHz clock is running
0.9 uA at 3V in power-save mode and only the 32 kHz wake-up timer is running
Would that be adequate?
So with your power budget you could (just barely) actively run this chip at 2 V and 1 MHz all the time, without ever using any of the reduce-power modes.
I’m honestly curious – what is this “other stuff” that you claim takes about 100uA?
I always end up using at least one LED, and that’s 10,000 uA all by itself.](http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/param_table_v2.asp?family_id=607)](http://www.microchip.com/xlp)](http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc7903.pdf)
I recently used a ATtiny43U with a claim of 0.35µA (350nA) while in power down and WDT disabled, and I can confirm this is true. This is the tiny with the on board boost converter to operate off a single 1.5V cell.