What is advantage/disadvantage between LDO and DCDC ?

[Phong Le]

Hi , 

We are using MCU nRF52832-QFAA-R (Flash 512KB & RAM 64KB) with softdevice s132 - 6.0.0.

I am not sure what is extracly Soc Revision of the MCU ? But I read some information of another blog from someone and
I care about this answer "For the second revision of the nRF51 hardware, we do not recommend customers to use the DC/DC together with the BLE softdevices.."

Can I ask you a reason why we shouldn't do that ?

With our implementation, we don't use radio and only broadcast BLE every 1 second.

The current consumption(idle mode) of our own board is around 150-200uA, and we want to try to apply DCDC built in along to LDO for saving energy.

Therefore, I want to know that what is actually advantage/disadvantage between LDO and DCDC?

Does have any impact if we apply DCDC converter ?

Does it affect the ability to connect or transmit (BLE) between devices and mobile application ?

Currently, we have more than 1000 devices and we need to consider all impacts carefully before apply new change.

Thanks and regards,

Phong Le

[Kenneth]

Hi,

Based on your description you are using the nRF52832, which is not the same as the nRF51-series. The nRF51-series have some limitations that does not apply to the nRF52-series.

There is no problem to use DCDC with the nRF52832. You can get an estimate of power consumption improvement by toggling the DCDC regulator on and off in our online power profiler to find the difference in peak and average power consumption with DCDC:
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/power/w/opp/2/online-power-profiler-for-bluetooth-le 

Kenneth