Adapting power consumption to performance requirements in a MSP430 microcontroller

Microcontroller based low power systems using batteries must run at low clock frequencies with short activity periods to extend battery life. These constraints reduce the microcontroller computational capabilities and limit the complexity of algorithms that can be used. New microcontroller architectures, as the Texas Instruments MSP430 family, allow to adapt power consumption to application performance requirements combining several low power modes with the capability of switching the clock frequency dynamically. A complete characterization of power consumption vs. performance has been obtained for the MSP430. A method to determine the range of clock frequencies that meets a consumption and execution time constraints for a given algorithm has been developed.