I have at the moment a circuit using an Atmega328P that sleeps using the timer and consumes ~4.5uA in sleep mode. Is there any way to get that lower? Is there other Arduino based chips that can sleep with a wake up timer better than an Atmega328P?
Attiny 24-44-84, 0.13uA in sleep mode and WDT disabled and VCC = 3V.
Attiny25, similar.
Attiny2313, similar.
Atmega1284P, similar, 0.15uA. WDT enabled, 5uA.
In sleep mode with WDT disabled, nothing is switching internally, so no power is consumed.
Power in a digital CMOS chip is proportional to clock frequency, how many gates are clocking(*), and supply
voltage squared. (plus some losses from the crystal oscillator and analog circuitry in practice)
Thus the 3.3V 8MHz ATmega running normally consumes less than a quarter of the power as at
16MHz and 5V...
(*) actually the total capacitance of all signals / gates that are clocking, thus f C V^2
By the way trying to get the current consumption below a few uA may be fairly pointless - the leakage
current in your battery will start to dominate at some point, so you may be making no further
improvements to battery life. 5 years at 5uA is 220mAh of charge (pretty small battery), yet some
battery technologies self-discharge on faster timescales than this.