nRF52 at 1.8V - DCDC efficiency?

[samsonc]

Hi, Is there any information on how much improvement the DCDC has over the LDO at 1.8V? I'm working on a heavily space-constrained application, and I'm trying to make a decision as to whether or not it's worthwhile to use the board space for the inductors.

Thanks!

[Hung Bui]

Hi Samsonc,

I'm afraid we don't have much to provide you. The gain of using DCDC largely depends on the application you have, which peripherals running (CPU or Radio or other peripheral) and how often. The supply voltage is just one of the parameters. You may want to give us some more description such as BLE connectivity parameters, how many bytes you sent, how long is the CPU processing time, we can give you back the effectiveness of using DCDC in your use case.

[samsonc]

Actually, a potential recommendation: for me, anyway, it would have been useful to see the numbers in the power profiler for DC-DC on and off. With the availability of some genuinely miniscule modules (and applications) for the nRF52 (many which don't have a built-in inductor at smaller sizes), I think there will be others who might also be asking if they really want the extra inductor hogging board space.