On Mon, 15 Mar 2004 23:33:07 -0500, Denny Esterline wrote:
> I was at a Motorola seminar (no flames please :-) about the HCS08 low power
> chips. We did a lab experiment that proved conclusively the key to power
> savings is to sleep as much as possible and run as fast as you can when you
> aren't sleeping. The power savings were significant.

That's exactly the design theory behind the MSP430 family from TI. Run
on as low a voltage as possible (1.8V to 3.6V in this case) and as low
a frequency as possible for your main clock (32 KHz), then use a high
speed clock (RC or locked to the 32Khz crystal) for "burst" processing.
It works amazingly well -- the last MSP430 project was a PIC16C924
conversion and using the same peripheral sensors and hardware I managed
to more than quadruple the battery life of a 3.6V lithium cell. For
lowest power battery operation and modest processing needs, the
MSP430's are tough to beat, even by the nanowatt PIC devices.

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

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