The polling mode can be activated to reduce current drawn in ignition-off condition to conserve battery charge. Unlike the continuous mode, the current sources and sinks do not stay on continuously in the polling mode. Instead, they are turned on or off sequentially from IN0 to IN23 and cycled through each individual input channel. The microcontroller can be put to sleep to reduce overall system power. If a switch status change (SSC) is detected by the TIC12400-Q1, the INT pin (if enabled for the input channel) is asserted low (and the SSC bit in INT_STAT register and the SPI status flag SSC are also asserted to logic 1). The INT pin assertion can be used to wake up the system regulator which, in turn, wakes up the microcontroller as described in section Microcontroller Wake-Up. The microcontroller can then use SPI communication to read the switch status information.

The polling is activated when the TRIGGER bit in the CONFIG register is set to logic 1. There are 2 different polling schemes that can be configured in TIC12400-Q1: standard polling and matrix polling.