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MediaTek and RDA WiFi Microcontrollers

Published Dec 16, 2018 by Thorsten von Eicken
At https://blog.voneicken.com/2018/lp-wifi-other/
In Running Wifi Microcontrollers on Battery
Tagged Low-Power , Wifi

Unisoc’s RDA5981 and MediaTek’s MT7697 microcontrollers (as well as variants of these two) also incorporate a WiFi radio on the chip and target low-power embeded IoT applications.

Unisoc RDA5981

Hi-Link HLK-M50 module with RDA5981
Hi-Link HLK-M50 module with RDA5981
The RDA5981 incorporates an ARM Cortex-M4 core with 352KB RAM and 1MB flash in one chip. The HLK-M50 is one low-cost module that incorporates the chip and I’m expecting one in the mail soon. In the meantime I’ve taken a closer look at the datasheet to see what I might expect.

One interesting feature of the chip is that its recommended supply voltage range is from 3.3V to 4.2V, which means that one can run it straight off a LiPo without regulator! A first glipse at what to expect in terms of power consumption is provided by the following table from the datasheet:

RDA5981 power consumption

The deep-sleep, RX and TX mode power levels look very comparable to the other microcontrollers examined so far. I don’t know what the “WIFI OFF” refers to but I wonder whether it’s really supposed to read 22 milliamperes with the CPU running and the RF section being off.

Another module which uses the RDA5891 is MxChip’s EMW3080 and A_D Electronics uncovered a more interesting power consumption table in its docs:

EMW3080 power consumption

Is this table the power consumption while Wifi is connected is listed at 47mA, which certainly does not compete with the Espressif microcontrollers or the RTL8710. But as seen with the other microcontrollers, until the thing is running some test apps on the bench it’s impossible to tell what the actual power consumption will be.

MediaTek MT7697

LinkIt 7697 board with MT7697
LinkIt 7697 board with MT7697
The MT7697 is a little different from all the other microcontrollers examined so far in that it includes a separate processor for the Wifi portion. The application processor is an ARM Cortex-M4 with on-board RAM and a Flash interface. The Wifi processor is unspecified but some of the diagrams show that it’s also an ARM processor. While this dual-core set-up might look similar to the ESP32 it differs in that the two microprocessors are completely separated and the Wifi processor is not accessible to application code at all.

One of the benefits of the dual-processor architecture is that the application processor can be completely shut down when sleeping while keeping the Wifi processor active to maintain a connection to the access point. The downside is that there’s more to power when both are on.

The most interesting document I’ve found so far is the power mode developer’s guide which shows a 9.6mA sleep mode using FreeRTOS tickless idle and a 1.1mA “legacy sleep” mode:

MT7697 Legacy sleep chart

Another interesting document on low power modes has the following table:

Scenario Typical Results [mA]
Legacy Sleep 0.667
WiFi Radio off (tickless) 10.79
WiFi Radio off (legacy sleep) 0.97
WiFi Connected (DTIM 1, tickless) 14.18
WiFi Connected (DTIM 1, legacy cleep tickless) 4.64
WiFi Connected (DTIM10, legacy sleep tickless) 2.07

That looks right in the ballpark of the esp32 to me, but only experimentation will tell for sure…

Stay tuned for the next post…


Project: Running Wifi Microcontrollers on Battery

  • Project introduction
  • ESP8266 Deep-Sleep with Periodic Wake-up
  • ESP8266 with Optimized Periodic Wake-up
  • Low-Power Wifi using Power Save Mode
  • ESP8266 Maintaining an Association
  • Low-Power Wifi with the ESP32
  • ESP32 Deep-Sleep with Periodic Wake-up
  • ESP32 Deep-Sleep Connecting to MQTT
  • Low-Power ESP32 Boards
  • ESP32 Maintaining an Association
  • ESP32 Dynamic Frequency Scaling
  • ESP32 Pushing the Envelope
  • ESP8266 vs. ESP32 on Battery Power
  • RTL8710 First Impressions
  • RTL8710 Deep-Sleep with Periodic Wake-up
  • MediaTek and RDA WiFi Microcontrollers

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