The disclosure relates to minimizing power consumption of a WiFi system-on-chip (SOC) during idle periods. The disclosed architecture includes memory banks for the WiFi SoC's embedded processor that can be independently powered on/off and a Memory Management Unit (MMU) to translate virtual addresses to physical addresses and generate exceptions to process accesses to virtual addresses without a corresponding physical address. The architecture can implement a demand paging scheme whereby a MMU fault from an access to code/data not within the embedded memory causes the processor to fetch the code/data from an off-chip secondary memory. To minimize page faults, the architecture stores WiFi client code/data within the embedded processor's memory that is repeatedly accessed with a short periodicity or where there is an intolerance for delays of accessing the code/data.