English for Specific Purposes

130 Electronic Engineering

9. Atmel AVR Microcontroller

It is well known that microcontrollers can be run at different speeds. At lower the frequency less power is used. When designing a product for lowest possible system power, it does not make sense to clock every part of a microcontroller at the same frequency.

The Atmel AVR microcontroller employs multiple clock domains to enable different parts of the microcontroller – the core, the internal buses, and the individual peripherals – to be individually clocked to save power. If the maximum throughput of a peripheral is not needed in an application, the clock can be lowered. Individual clocks can be applied to different peripherals so they can be fully optimized with power consumption in mind. The throughput or feature requirement of the application is still fulfilled while power consumption is lowered.

It's one thing to be able to scale the clocks individually. But with the AVR architecture, unused peripherals can also be fully shut down individually and enabled again during runtime, further lowering power consumption without compromising system operation.

Multiple clock domains allow an application to be

optimized for performance and power at the same

time.