Reducing the Standby Power Consumption of the S3 State for PCs

Most research projects with respect to energy saving are trying to improve power efficiency and are using software to manage the power systems in the power on mode; but in our design, we modify the original Suspend to RAM mode-S3 state, which is the 3rd system state as defined by the ACPI specification, in order to reduce power consumption. We've redesigned the control circuit to save power while a PC is in the standby mode. First, we re-examine the entire circuit in the standby mode, and clarify which chip is used both to wake up the system and to turn off all unnecessary standby power previously used by the chips. Secondly, we redesign the power sequence and use an additional chip to control the system power supply, to allow a PC's normal system's operation to turn off the unnecessary power control chips. Third, in order to save power supply in the standby mode, we have simplified the multiple remote wake-up mechanism to control the remote boot device. The improvement shows that our design reduced power consumption to 0.21W from the original 0.56W while all the remote wake-up functions are disabled; and consumes 0.42W when using multiple remote wake-up functions. We implement the above modification from the legacy S3 state, and obtain lower power consumption. In order to distinguish the standby states, we name the modified S3 state as Deep S3 state.