How to minimise Wi-Fi power consumption (BCM43362) while staying connected?

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Anonymous
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The numbers below apply to the BCM43362 Wi-Fi chip.

Other Broadcom Wi-Fi chips may consume less current and/or have other power consumption modes.

From the 43362 datasheet, the average current consumption for DTIM=1 is 1.9mA.

200uA of this is quiescent sleep current, 1.7mA is current used to wakeup to receive a 1ms beacon every 100ms.

If the listen interval is set so that the 43362 only wakes every 10 (or 100) beacons (instead of every beacon),

  • 1 second wakeup : 200uA = sleep, wakeup is averaged at 170uA
  • 10 second wakeup : 200uA = sleep, wakeup is averaged at 17uA

Note that if the device misses a beacon when it wakes up, it will try to probe the AP to get back in sync which will use power.

So, for long sleep times, it is important to make sure that the EXT_SLEEP_CLK pin is supplied by an accurate 32kHz oscillator.

See the 32k sleep clock forum post for more info about this
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