An evaluation of energy efficient microcontrollers

The latest technological trends in many application fields e.g. the Internet of Things call for highly power efficient solutions. These solutions can be realised with current low power off the shelf microcontrollers. However the task of selecting the appropriate microcontroller is more difficult than it seems. The datasheets provide inadequate information which hinders fair comparisons among the different microcontrollers. This work attempts to give a solution to this issue using a set of low power microcontrollers available in our laboratory, together with a set of benchmarks which implement common tasks. We present the results of a comparison among these microcontrollers in terms of execution time, power consumption and energy consumption for the execution of the set of benchmarks.