russpatterson wrote: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...
That was once true, years ago, before the ""nanoWatt XLP"" and "PicoPower" buzzwords.
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.
