Calculating current consumption of CPU and Radio on nRF51822

[Sebastian]

I am trying to come up with an estimate for the current consumption of my application for the nRF51822 and I am getting a little bit confused.

To give you a broad overview of what i am doing: The CPU starts the radio and is then sent to sleep via __WFE(). From this point the CPU is only used during interrupt handling to control the radio. The radio runs in BLE mode.

1. Whats the current consumption of the CPU during the sleeping phases? Is it just I_ON,16k ? Am I missing anything?

2. Do the values for RX and TX currents include the clock ressources needed?

3. Are there any shared ressources between CPU and Radio that i need to take of when adding the current values?

[John]

Section 14 of the S110 SoftDevice Specification V2.0 has a very nice graph and table of the power consumed when BLE events occur. The only downer is that it doesn't supply the actual power numbers it just specifies what different things are drawing current. But you can pull those numbers from the nRF51 Product Spec and add them up. See section 8 of the Product Spec.

As for the idle current, see section 8 of the nRF51 Product Spec as well, table 32.