Since the end devices of the Internet of Things (IoT) are battery operated products, careful consideration for ultra-low power (ULP) is required. The Micro Controller Unit (MCU) industry has developed very effective functions to save energy, but developers have difficulty in selecting the MCU because various operating modes are applied to reduce energy consumption by manufacturers. Therefore, this paper introduces ULPMark benchmark, a standardized benchmark method that can compare MCUs of various vendors and feature sets, and provides hardware functions for ultra-low-power operation of the two platforms that received the high evaluation scores from ULPMark. In addition, we investigated and analyzed how developers can utilize the functions for ultra low power consumption through driver APIs and detailed register control.
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