nRF52 Timer power consumption

[Hamid]

I run the below code on nRF52DK and measure the power consumption of the chip (using nRF current measurement jumpers). The current consumption is 0.47 mA which is a lot just for a timer in my application.

1- Would you please confirm my measurement with the same code?

2- Could you please let me know a way to use the timer with 16Mhz clock source and reduce the power consumption?

Thanks.

void timer_handler(nrf_timer_event_t event_type, void * p_context) {}

int main(void)
{   
   nrf_drv_timer_config_t timer_cfg = NRF_DRV_TIMER_DEFAULT_CONFIG;    
   nrf_drv_timer_init(&m_timer, &timer_cfg, timer_handler); 
   nrf_drv_timer_enable(&m_timer);
    
   while (1)
   {
        __WFE();
        __SEV();
        __WFE();
   }

}

[FormerMember]

Unfortunately, there is an error in the product specification, and the current consumption you measure is normal for the nRF52832..

The current consumption should be a little lower if you can use the internal 16 MHz RC oscillator instead of the external HFCLK.

[Alexx]

How much consumption nRF52832 is expected from the Timer1 clk 31250Hz and the processor in the idle, clocking from HFINT?

[AmbystomaLabs]

Any time you are running HF timers you are running an HF clock.  If you actually care about accuracy then you would need to run HF_EXT as HFINT can be off by several percent. Either way running the HF clocks is a very power hungry service and nearly as bad and running the whole processor.

If you need low power, you should try to adapt your needs to the RTC timers. Since they clock nearly 1/500 as much, they use very little power.

[Alexx]

Yes, but why does the manual say: "Run current with 1 MHz clock input (PCLK1M) 8 μA MAX", p241 nRF52832_PS_v1.4.pdf :)

[FormerMember]

The current consumption in the "TIMER" chapter specifies the current consumption used by the TIMER module itself. Since the TIMER peripheral uses the HFCLK, you would need to add the current consumption of the selected HFCLK source to get the total amount of current used.