The Sensor Controller contains circuitry that can be selectively enabled in standby mode. The peripherals in this domain may be controlled by the Sensor Controller Engine, which is a proprietary power-optimized CPU. This CPU can read and monitor sensors or perform other tasks autonomously, thereby significantly reducing power consumption and offloading the main Cortex-M3 CPU.

The Sensor Controller is set up using a PC-based configuration tool, called Sensor Controller Studio, and potential use cases may be (but are not limited to):

• Analog sensors using integrated ADC
• Digital sensors using GPIOs, bit-banged I²C, and SPI
• UART communication for sensor reading or debugging
• Capacitive sensing
• Waveform generation
• Pulse counting
• Keyboard scan
• Quadrature decoder for polling rotation sensors
• Oscillator calibration

The peripherals in the Sensor Controller include the following:

• The low-power clocked comparator can be used to wake the device from any state in which the comparator is active. A configurable internal reference can be used in conjunction with the comparator. The output of the comparator can also be used to trigger an interrupt or the ADC.
• Capacitive sensing functionality is implemented through the use of a constant current source, a time-to-digital converter, and a comparator. The continuous time comparator in this block can also be used as a higher-accuracy alternative to the low-power clocked comparator. The Sensor Controller will take care of baseline tracking, hysteresis, filtering and other related functions.
• The ADC is a 12-bit, 200-ksamples/s ADC with eight inputs and a built-in voltage reference. The ADC can be triggered by many different sources, including timers, I/O pins, software, the analog comparator, and the RTC.
• The Sensor Controller also includes a SPI–I²C digital interface.
• The analog modules can be connected to up to eight different GPIOs.

The peripherals in the Sensor Controller can also be controlled from the main application processor.