Experimental study on the power consumption of timers embedded into microcontrollers

Abstract

An experimental study on the current consumption of timers embedded into microcontrollers is presented in this work. The study is carried out in two commercial microcontrollers (MSP430FR5969 and ATtiny2313) and the experimental results are compared with the scarce data provided in their datasheets. The sensitivity (expressed in µA/MHz) reported in the datasheet seems to be only applicable if the frequency divider of the timer equals one. Otherwise, such a sensitivity is lower but there is a significant offset component, leading to a higher power consumption at the same operating frequency. The knowledge extracted from this work is expected to provide guidelines to better use embedded timers in low-power sensor applications.