4 ms·

At that point, the power controller would be as complex as your application processor, and you'd be trying to figure out how to power gate some of its features.

• minthd 12y ago
  Ok maybe instruction by instruction is a bit too much, But you could simple divide the core to many power areas(say 32), and before each code section, let a compiler set the optimal power gating for it by writing a 32 bit value. I'm sure such an arrangement would get most of the power efficiency, with minimal complexity in the mcu.
  • Sanddancer 12y ago
    A lot of micros already do that, with various levels of sleep, and lots and lots of i/o driven interrupts to wake up the processor when relevant data needs managed. What this ends up as is your processors main function sets up the proc, and then runs a loop that consists of little more than while(1) { sleep(); }. When some state changes that needs CPU time, it'll raise an interrupt, the interrupt handler will do what's needed, and the proc will go back to sleep. Micros have a lot of smart, low power peripheral processing available to them that helps keep power consumption even lower.
    • minthd 12y ago
      You're talking about smart autonomous peripherals.They're great,but if you need to run arbitrary code(or have the design more portable),you'll need to use the core, so it's valuable to have a similar fine grained power-gating applied to the core.