Power consumption question

[Jay]

Hi,

I noticed that my current NRF52 based prototype is consuming 4.5mA as soon as I enable the BLE functionality, when its off its only 1.6mA

I send the chip to a sleep in he main loop whenever it does not have anything to do but this does not improve on the power consumtopn with ehabled BLE.

The high power consumption starts as soon as the BLE functionality gets enabled even when no data are sent or recived.

If I'm reading the datasheet correctly this is much to high.

Any ideas what may be the rason, any often done mistakes i should check for first?

Cheers

[haakonsh]

How exactly have you measured the current consumption?
we need details.

[Jay]

I used a 1 ohm schunt resistorand a this current shunt monitor: http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ina216.pdf

Also I can confirm that unplugging the debuger cable and power cycling the board does no solve the issue.

[haakonsh]

Is the 1ohm shunt populated at R6? 
What peripherals and gpios are you using?

[Jay]

its a custom board, it also has a ICM20948 gyro/accel sensor and a flash memory chip. but when i disable ble the power consumption drops to 1.6mA thatsstill a lo but clearly the most part before was ble

[haakonsh]

Hey Jay, I need you to electrically isolate the nRF52 from the rest of the circuit and re-run your measurements. We need to determine if the current consumption is due to the nRF52 or external circuitry before we proceed. I have experienced painful debugging sessions where I ultimately traced an increased current consumption to a faulty MOSTFET on a custom board. 

I usually start by cutting traces to the most suspecting circuit. In this case it's the external IC.
You might want to write some dummy code for the interaction between the nRF52 and the external circuits, so your application wont crash.