MCU Goes Green Trying To Do Nothing

Oct. 7, 2008

The trick to conserving power is to do nothing—or next to nothing. Most low-power microcontrollers utilize this approach in some fashion. Freescale’s MPC8536E incorporates a number of features to optimize power consumption in a network envi

William G. Wong

The trick to conserving power is to do nothing—or next to nothing. Most low-power microcontrollers utilize this approach in some fashion. Freescale’s MPC8536E incorporates a number of features to optimize power consumption in a network environment. Its gigabit Ethernet ports support packet lossless deep sleep. When in use, the Ethernet ports are active and filter incoming network traffic while the rest of the chip is in deep-sleep mode. Packets are buffered in local memory and copied to dynamic memory if they’re destined for processing based on the advanced filtering system. The 1.5-GHz e500 processor is then started. The MPC8663E also has a range of lower-power jog modes including doze (snooping on), nap (processor idle), sleep (CPU and snoop off), and deep sleep, which uses less than 1 W. The Ethernet filtering support can operate in all these modes.

FREESCALE www.freescale.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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