Design

RTOS's tickless support reduces MCU power consumption

29th August 2014
Nat Bowers
0

Supporting the increased efficiency and reduced power consumption required for modern embedded systems, SEGGER has added tickless low power support to its embOS RTOS. Stopping the periodic system tick interrupt during idle periods, the new support enables the timer to be reprogrammed to spend as much time as possible in low power mode.

Keeping a processor in sleep/idle mode for as long as possible is one of the most common ways to reduce power consumption. Even if there is nothing to do, a typical RTOS will wake the processor on a regular system tick. Creating a variable length system tick which allows the processor to continue sleeping when there are no application tasks to execute, the embOS tickless low power support reduces power consumption.

Making a significant difference to battery life, stopping the tick interrupt allows the microcontroller to remain in a deep power saving state until an interrupt occurs or the RTOS kernel has to transit a task into the ready state.

Tickless support can be added to any embOS project and is available with the latest version. SEGGER also offers application notes for tickless support for different CPUs.

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