NRF52832 idle current when advertising

[melvinvdb]

Hi all,

So I've developed a custom board with the NRF52832 qfaa e1 and using Mbed OS 5. 
System on current is around 3.5uA when not using BLE.

When using BLE my idle current is 14uA. For me this seems a bit high but I'm unsure if that's really the case or just normal.
I've enabled the DCDC regulator to lower the advertisement current to 6mA. See screenshots for what I mean.

When using the nordic sdk 11 system_on_wakeup_on_gpio the current is as follow (average of 3.5uA):

Is the 14uA normal for when BLE is enabled? If this can be improved to be even lower I would very much like to know how.

Thanks in advance!

Melvin van den Berg

[melvinvdb]

Oh and I'm asking this question because it's a bit strange that the current consumption drops to ~3uA after the advertisement for a few ms and than goes to 14uA. The advertisment interval in this example is 2s. 

[Hung Bui]

Hi Melvin, 

14uA is not the normal sleeping current of the nRF52 chip, there must be something else running. I would suggest you to post this on mbed forum as well. We are currently on reduced staff due to the holiday season, our expert in mbed is not available at the moment. We will try to get back to you when we have the full staff back. 

[melvinvdb]

Hi Hung,

Thank you for your reply. I will order a Sparkfun nrf52832 board to verify it is not hardware related to my custom board. If I'm sure it's not hardware related I will also post it on mbed forums.