At 07:49 PM 3/16/2004 -0600, you wrote:
>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.

Why do you say "modest processing needs"? The current 8MHz MSP430s
have the same cycle time as a 32MHz PIC (with 25MHz supposedly
coming RSN) but more importantly many of them have a real 16 x 16
hardware multiplier (4 times the size of the wimpy 8 x 8 in the
PIC18 /17C series).

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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