A sneak preview
The sleep current war between MCU vendors is bogus.
Regular readers of embedded.com are aware of the sleep current war raging between MCU vendors. Marketing glitz and web pages are the guns; white papers are the ammo, which is being broadsided with increasing frequency. Everything claimed is probably true, but much of it is misleading and/or irrelevant.
It's truly remarkable just how little current is needed to keep a processor alive today. In the deepest sleep modes even some ARM parts claim just 20 nA (nanoamp) of consumption. That's a mere 0.02 microamp, a number that boggles the mind.
In the desktop world CPUs suck over 100 amps while active, so I salute the MCU community for achieving such astonishingly-low figures.
First, some context. In the trenches of this war lie the lowly CR2032, a typical coin cell that's oft-quoted as the canonical battery for extremely-long-lived systems (Figure 1 ).
It's nominal voltage is 3.0, perfect for these 1.8 to 2V min MCUs, and the discharge curve has a sharp knee. They are considered “dead” at 2.0 V, which is confirmed by my experiments. Here's data for a number of batteries, all from one batch from the same vendor, discharged at a 0.5 mA rate as shown in Figure 2 :
One vendor said: “Not recommended for use after shelf life expires as the chemicals in the battery break down and it looses power a lot quicker, and there can be corrosion or leakage.”
It's poor engineering practice to use a component beyond its rated specifications.
Though the war is all about battery lifetime of a mostly-sleeping system, that's irrelevant for design engineers. The right question (which no one seems to be asking ) is: how much useful work can the system do while awake?
“Useful work” translates into a lot of things (clock rate, instruction set efficiency, etc ), but is ultimately bounded by how much current the system (MCU and other components) can consume while awake. It's is the budget a design engineer has to work with, and cannot be exceeded (on average ).
Doing the math, I came up with the following curve (Figure 3 ), which assumes a ten year battery life. It shows the number of mA available while awake, as a function of time spent sleeping and amount of current consumed while sleeping.
Every MCU has vastly different mixes of features. Some wake up quickly. Others execute at great speed so wake times are minimized. Some preserve registers and memory while asleep; others don't. Brown-out and watchdog circuits may or may not be viable options while sleeping if maximum battery life is desired. So making comparisons is difficult. Even the sleep current numbers are frustratingly difficult to parse as not all vendors give worst-case values.
This article is titled “A Sneak Preview ” because it's just the tip of the iceberg. I've been running experiments for 6 months to gain a deeper understanding about building ultra-long-lived battery-powered systems, and will be reporting more results soon.
Some of my experiments are quantifying the behavior of the components we use. For instance, there's very little known about how a CR2032 discharges in these ultra-low-sleep current applications, and I've amassed a vast amount of data using some custom tools, like that in the following photograph below. The results are surprising, and lead me to doubt that even a ten year life is attainable in a real system.

Vendors have been very generous in offering their tools and support; for instance, I've evaluated several tools for measuring current, including:
* IAR's I-Jet
* The Real-Time Current Monitor
* The uCurrent
Microchip just sent me their latest current-measuring tool, which I hope to dig into between trips to the Middle East and ESC-India this month. Agilent is sending their very interesting new N2820A current probe, which has a claimed 3 MHz bandwidth and 86 dB dynamic range. I'll review them both, and other similar tools as they become available.
Stay tuned!
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded developmentissues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companieswith their embedded challenges, and works as an expert witness onembedded issues. Contact him at . His website is.
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Nine-cell battery profiler using an mbed ARM controller board.
I like that.
Amazing Article.
“An A/D reads battery voltages”
I recently designed a “fuel gauge” feature to monitor the voltage of a coin cell powering an RTC. I was surprised to discover that the max leakage current of my MCU's analog inputs was +/-1uA, which is 50x greater than the
Good question! The batteries go to low-R analog switches, which then feed a non-inverting voltage follower before going to the A/D. The voltage follower's input impedance is extremely high.
Hi Jack.
Are you familiar with the work that EEMBC Ultra low power Benchmark initiative? It would be a good contribution to this article series. What the members are working towards is a unified way of measuring and bench marking products for low power
An
Kewl stuff Jack. I hope the next time you are in Chicago we can get together. The last time we met in person was an an IEEE conference in Boston about 15 years ago. You gave a class that I attended, and I gave a paper on semiconductor manufacturing executi
Oops… Thought it was you, but I may be mistaken! 🙂 Anyway, do contact me if you get to Chicago in any case! woboyle@ieee.org
Interesting graph, have to remember that. Guess this is just the latest offshoot of the “green” movement to run on power that they'd like to assume was scavenged in the first place, they'll make all manner of irrational assumptions including the processor
This is a very difficult issue. Some on-chip brownout detectors require far more current than the MCU core does in sleep mode.
Writing to flash usually takes quite a lot of energy. And holding up the power using a capacitor will (probably) not work. If yo
Wow! Thanks Jack, I'm used to asking questions I haven't been getting answers for, especially from some obvious support organizations (on whom I don't want to put TOO much blame, they're trying as hard as they can), but you're restoring my faith in our emb
I was going to make a similar comment. We at EEMBC are well along with establishing what we're calling ULPBench. It's a much more sophisticated benchmark than just running a 'pile of code' and takes into account sleep modes, real time clock function, and e
“Your premise, “The sleep current war between MCU vendors is bogus.” is misleading. While sleep current may not be significant for coin cells, sleep current is very important for applications using a low self-discharge rate battery such as lithium thion
“This is not correctly even large value electrolytic-capacitors can have leakage current in the Nano amp range, If treated correctly, Read this http://www.tadiranbatteries.de/pdf/applications/leakage-current-properties-of-modern-electrolytic-capacit