picoPower Design Examples
The resources below hightlight low-power design techniques applicable to Atmel® AVR® microcontrollers, enabling you to save power without losing functionality.
Videos
Selected examples of applied low-power techniques for Atmel AVR microcontrollers.
 The ParrotPower-saving and CPU relief with the AVR XMEGA® Event System and DMA. - Applicable to AVR XMEGA microcontrollers. |  Basic picoPowerGeneral power-saving techniques for all Atmel AVR microcontrollers. - Most of the techniques shown work with any Atmel AVR microcontroller, but some require specific picoPower® features. |  SleepWalkingThe SleepWalking feature of the Atmel AVR UC3L explained in a simple but practical example. |
Application Notes and Code Examples
Below is a selection of Atmel appnotes and code examples targeting low-power design for AVR picoPower® microcontrollers.
 | AVR4013: picoPower Basics(7 pages, revision A, updated 12/10)
This application note demonstrates how to extend the battery life of our application by multiple factors by modifying only the firmware. You will see that, while some of the modifications are very simple and only require setting some registers, other modifications will need some rewriting of the code. | |
|  | AVR1010: Minimizing the power consumption of XMEGA devices(13 pages, revision B, updated 11/09)
This application note describes what must be done to achieve the lowest possible power consumption for XMEGA devices. Example code is also supplied, which compiles with both GCC and IAR Embedded Workbench. |
| | AVR32739: Low power software design using 32-bit AVR UC3 (13 pages, revision B, updated 05/08)
This application note gives an overview of available features on the UC3 A and B series that help decrease power consumption. Most sections of this application note are also applicable for other 32-bit AVR devices. |
| | AVR1504: Xplain training - XMEGA Event System(15 pages, revision A, updated 8/10)
This Application Note will get you started with Atmel® AVR® XMEGA™ Event System which allows inter-peripheral communication, enabling a change of state in one peripheral to automatically trigger actions in other peripherals, without any use of interrupts or CPU and DMA resources. |
| | AVR1509: Xplain training - Low Power(12 pages, revision A, updated 8/10)
This Application Note will get you started with Atmel® AVR® XMEGA™ various sleep modes and software controlled clock gating which allow to tailor power consumption to the application's requirement. |
| AVR462: Reducing the Power Consumption of AT90EIT1(3 pages, revision A, updated 3/02)
This Application Note describes a small modification to the AVR Embedded Internet Toolkit. This will reduce the power consumption and the operating temperature of the board. | |
| AVR035: Efficient C Coding for 8-bit AVR microcontrollers (22 pages, revision D, updated 01/04)
This Application Note describes how to utilize the advantages of the 8-bit AVR architecture and the development tools to achieve more efficient c Code than for any other microcontroller. | |
| | AVR053: Calibration of the internal RC oscillator(15 pages, revision G, updated 5/06)
This application note describes a method to calibrate the internal RC oscillator and targets all AVR devices with tunable RC oscillator. Furthermore, an easily adaptable calibration firmware source code is also offered. |
|  | AVR054: Run-time calibration of the internal RC oscillator via the UART(17 pages, revision C, updated 04/08)
This application note describes how to calibrate the internal RC oscillator via the UART. In the method used a slave node is synchronized to a master node at the beginning of every message frame. |
| AVR140: ATmega48/88/168 family run-time calibration of the Internal RC oscillator(12 pages, revision A, updated 9/06)
This application note describes how to calibrate the internal RC oscillator via the UART. The method used is based on the calibration method used in the Local Inteconnect Network (LIN) protocol. | |
| | AVR1304: Using the XMEGA DMA Controller(10 pages, revision B, updated 7/09)
This application note describes the basic functionality of the XMEGA DMAC with code examples to get up and running quickly. A driver interface written in C is included as well. |
| | AVR1606: XMEGA Internal RC Oscillator Calibration(10 pages, revision A, updated 12/09)
This application note describes a fast and accurate method to calibrate the internal RC oscillator. It offers an easily adaptable calibration firmware source code, which can be used with any XMEGA with internal tunable RC oscillator and JTAG interface. This firmware allows device calibration using the AVR tools JTAGICE mkII and AVRONE. |
