The trick to conserving power is to do
nothing—or next to nothing. Most low-power
microcontrollers utilize this approach in some
fashion. Freescale’s MPC8536E incorporates
a number of features to optimize power consumption
in a network environment. Its gigabit
Ethernet ports support packet lossless deep
sleep. When in use, the Ethernet ports are
active and filter incoming network traffic while
the rest of the chip is in deep-sleep mode.
Packets are buffered in local memory and
copied to dynamic memory if they’re destined
for processing based on the advanced filtering
system. The 1.5-GHz e500 processor is
then started. The MPC8663E also has a range
of lower-power jog modes including doze
(snooping on), nap (processor idle), sleep
(CPU and snoop off), and deep sleep, which
uses less than 1 W. The Ethernet filtering support
can operate in all these modes.
FREESCALE
www.freescale.com