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AM6411: Minimal Power Consumption

Ma Tianfu
Prodigy 120 points
Part Number: AM6411
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AM2431, AM623, CC3551E, , SK-AM64B

Tool/software:

I understand that this industrial networking oriented family of sitara processors have no low power mode designed as other general purpose sitara processors have, such as AM623/625. But in our application, which requires pcie and high-speed parallel communication (could be perfectivly implemented by PRU-ICSSG) when powered by wall adapter, the system must also be kept to consume as little power as possible when powered by batteries. In this mode, the AM6411 (or AM2431) may be powered on by a BLE/WiFi processor (probably CC3551e), then stay in an active idle mode for a while and write a few mega bytes of data into pcie SSD intermittently. Both AM6411 and R52 processors could be put into stop mode (or some non-functional mode with even lower power consumption), a wait-for-interrupt cortex M4 is sufficient for this task.

I have played with the Power Estimation Tool. If everything is put into OFF state, there is still a power consumption of around 250mW. My question is, if this is the absolute minimal power consumption that can be achieved for this processor? Or, the tool is not quite accurate in this extreme case. With everyting OFF and only M4 core is waiting for interrupt, the power consumption can go even lower. We do hope it could be below 100mW to extend battery life, is this possible?

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 24011 points

    Hi,

    Thanks for reaching out. Could you please share the AM64 PET with your inputs so we can take a look? 

    Thanks,

    Brenda

  • 0 in reply to Ma Tianfu
    TI__Mastermind 24011 points

    What function of the AM64 would your application require in the "IDLE" mode? Have you consider turning OFF the AM64 and implement the wakup function in the power solution (i.e. PMIC)?

    Some PMICs integrate digital pins that can be configured as push-bottom or wakeup to trigger a power-up sequence on the SOC. 

    Thanks,

    Brenda

  • 0 in reply to Brenda Diaz
    Prodigy 120 points

    Hi, Brenda, thank you for your reply. We choose AM64 or AM24 for its PCIE interface, a SSD is connected. By Idle we mean the system is wake up by a BLE processor, and it may respond to a request through BLE, then bring up WiFi and send a chunk of data read from PCIE/SSD. The data request from the other party through BLE may be intermittent. So we won't switch off WiFi immediately. Keeping WiFi associated wont consume too much power, the current can be reduced to several tens of micro-amperes.

    When waiting for the next request, we do hope AM64/AM24 could consume as little power as possible, just like AM335x/437x or AM62x's "suspend to RAM" mode in linux. I understand AM64/24 don't have low power mode in silicon design as those general purpose processors do. We just want to know, when the system is waiting for next data request, to what extent we can reduce the power consumption. Say, If AM2431 is chosen, we hope that when PRU-ICSSG cores are not enabled, two R5 cores are in WFI state, stopped and clock gated, also the M4 core is in WFI state, waiting for a interrupt from WiFi processor. 

    If it is well below 100mW, then AM64/24 will be a good choice for our project. If not, we have to switch to a processor from Renesas, the RZ/G3S. But TI provides excellent MCU SDK, we do hope to use AM64/AM24 if possible. In my previous post you can see that in PET, when everything is switched off, there is still a 250mW power consumption. I just want to know whether this is the case and there is no hope to reduce it substantially, or it is the corner case and PET is not too accurate. It is worth to give it a trial in software. I have the SK-AM64B board and if you think the power consumption could be cut further by putting everything to WFI, I will spend some time to try it.

  • 0 in reply to Ma Tianfu
    TI__Mastermind 24011 points

    Hi,

    Thank You for your patience and for sharing additional information about the application use case. We currently don't have RTOS/software developed for power management on AM64. However, we could provide power data points as a reference for an SoC like AM62x that supports MCU low power mode. In this specific AM62x LPM, R5 and M4 are enabled and the expected power consumption is approximately 145mW. 

    Thanks,

    Brenda