Power Management and Energy Saving

Energy efficiency has always been one of the leading factors in the microcontroller market. Since the early 2000s, signal-processing 16-bit RISC microcontrollers, such as the MSP430, have been designed for extremely low-power usage and are still leading the path of ultra-low-power optimization architectures in embedded systems.

In the last few years, more advanced 32-bit RISC microcontrollers, rich in features and capable of running real-time operating systems, have scaled down in size and power consumption, and set foot in the low-power and ultra-low-power domains. Battery-powered systems and devices relying on energy-harvesting techniques are becoming more and more common in many industries. Low-power wireless communication is now offered by a number of connected platforms, so an increasing number of IoT systems include low-power and ultra-low-power characteristics in their design.

Depending on the architecture, microcontrollers offer different...