Power and clock management

Power and clock management in nRF52832 is optimized for ultra-low power applications.

The core of the power and clock management system is the Power Management Unit (PMU) illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Power Management Unit

The user application is not required to actively control power and clock, since the PMU is able to automatically detect which resources are required by the different components in the system at any given time. The PMU will continuously optimize the system based on this information to achieve the lowest power consumption possible without user interaction.

Current consumption scenarios

As the system is being constantly tuned by the PMU, estimating the energy consumption of an application can be challenging if the designer is not able to do measurements on the hardware directly. See Electrical specification for application scenarios showing average current drawn from the VDD supply.

Each scenario specifies a set of active operations and conditions applying to the given scenario. Table 1 shows the conditions used for a scenario unless otherwise is stated in the scenario description.

Table 1. Current consumption scenarios, common conditions
ConditionValue
VDD3 V
Temperature25°C
CPUWFI/WFE sleep
PeripheralsAll idle
ClockNot running
RegulatorDCDC

Electrical specification

Current consumption: Radio

SymbolDescriptionMin.Typ.Max.Units
IRADIO_TX0

0 dBm TX @ 1 Mb/s Bluetooth Low Energy mode, Clock = HFXO

7.1mA
IRADIO_TX1

-40 dBm TX @ 1 Mb/s Bluetooth Low Energy mode, Clock = HFXO

4.1mA
IRADIO_RX0

Radio RX @ 1 Mb/s Bluetooth Low Energy mode, Clock = HFXO

6.5mA

Current consumption: Radio protocol configurations

SymbolDescriptionMin.Typ.Max.Units
IS0

CPU running CoreMark from Flash, Radio 0 dBm TX @ 1 Mb/s Bluetooth Low Energy mode, Clock = HFXO, Cache enabled

9.2mA
IS1

CPU running CoreMark from Flash, Radio RX @ 1 Mb/s Bluetooth Low Energy mode, Clock = HFXO, Cache enabled

9.2mA

Current consumption: Ultra-low power

SymbolDescriptionMin.Typ.Max.Units
ION_RAMOFF_EVENT

System ON, No RAM retention, Wake on any event

1.2µA
ION_RAMON_EVENT

System ON, Full RAM retention, Wake on any event

1.5µA
ION_RAMOFF_RTC

System ON, No RAM retention, Wake on RTC

1.9µA
IOFF_RAMOFF_RESET

System OFF, No RAM retention, Wake on reset

0.3µA
IOFF_RAMOFF_GPIO

System OFF, No RAM retention, Wake on GPIO

0.3µA
IOFF_RAMOFF_LPCOMP

System OFF, No RAM retention, Wake on LPCOMP

1.9µA
IOFF_RAMOFF_NFC

System OFF, No RAM retention, Wake on NFC field

0.7µA
IOFF_RAMON_RESET

System OFF, Full 64 kB RAM retention, Wake on reset

0.7µA