Sleep-Mode Voltage Scaling

Abstract

In heavily duty-cycled embedded systems, the energy consumed by the microcontroller in idle mode is often the bottleneck for battery lifetime. Existing solutions address this problem by placing the microcontroller in a low-power (sleep) mode when idle and preserving application state either by retaining the data in situ in Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) or by checkpointing it to F lash . However, both of these approaches have notable drawbacks. In situ data retention requires the SRAM to remain powered in sleep mode, while checkpointing to F lash involves significant energy and time overheads. This article proposes a new ultra-low-power sleep mode for microcontrollers that overcomes the limitations of both of these approaches. Our technique, H ypnos , is based on the key observation that the on-chip SRAM in a microcontroller exhibits 100% data retention even at a much lower supply voltage (as much as 10× lower) than the typical operating voltage of the microcontroller. H ypnos exploits this observation by performing extreme voltage scaling when the microcontroller is in sleep mode. We implement and evaluate H ypnos for the TI MSP430G2452 microcontroller and show that the Microcontroller (MCU) draws only 26nA in the proposed sleep mode, which is 4× lower than a baseline sleep mode that preserves SRAM contents. Further, to reduce the overheads associated with performing the voltage scaling, we propose the use of an energy harvesting source for providing the scaled supply voltage and demonstrate (using a light sensing photodiode) that the current consumption in the proposed sleep mode can be reduced to 1nA, which is 100× lower than the current consumption in the baseline low-power mode. We also show that the decrease in sleep-mode power consumption translates to a reduction in application-level energy consumption by as much as 6.45×. By decreasing the average power consumption to such minuscule levels, H ypnos takes a significant step forward in making perpetual systems a reality through the use of energy harvesting.