Power consumption 52832

[Jason Anderssen]

Hi,

I am relatively new to programming hardware at this level, and have developed our product on the 52832, so finally I have purchased the Power Profiler Kit, and downloaded the NRFConnect and power profiler software.

Please see the attached screen shot, and can I ask if this is a good result in power consumption, or should I be trying to improve it further?

Sorry for such a newbie question, and any extra information or links to information to learn about power consumption more, would be fantastic, and much appreciated.

Cheers and thanks in advance for your help

Jason

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi Jason,

I would not say this is a good result, though I don't know anything about your product. I have a few observations:

• I see that there are some spikes which I guess is due to some activity on your board. They look a bit high if you only have the nRF consuming a significant amount of power, but we need to know more about what you are doing at that point to say more. It wold also be helpfull with a better time resolution. CAn you upload a plot where you have zoomed in on the spike itself (in time)?
• It seems like the base current is ~2 mA, which is a very high sleep current. If you have a typical battery powered device this is most likely unacceptable. Can you zoom in on the sleep current as well, so that we can see more closely the actual level? We also need to know more about your HW design and perhaps more important, what you do to limit current consumption in your FW. Typically you should disable any unused peripherals when needed, and put the CPU to sleep whenever it is not needed (typically from you main loop). You can refer to the BLE examples in the SDK to see how it is done there. You also need to make sure to disable logging, as UART logging causes the UART peripheral to be active, which in turn needs the high frequency clock etc, causing a high idle current consumption. A typical sleep current for a nRF52832 device is about 2-3 μA.