Battery Drain Analysis for Low Power IoT Devices

The devices that will drive the expansion of IoT in the future are being designed now. Users from the consumer, industrial, and medical sectors want IoT devices that can run longer on battery power, and device designers and makers need to understand their devices’ complex battery usage patterns to find ways to improve battery life. Users must use a range of instruments and software to help IoT designers, from chip design and test, RF module performance evaluation and test, to final product manufacturing test, which all require extensive battery drain analysis.
 

What are the challenges with IoT Batteries?

Low-power devices associated with IoT consume power at highly variable rates, from microseconds to seconds and from picoamperes to amperes. Accurate battery drain analysis measurements are critical to achieving the long battery life customers expect. Keysight’s broad range of solutions enables engineers to get convenient, fast, and accurate results that properly characterize battery drain analysis on IoT devices.
 

What requirements are needed for an IoT Battery?

An IoT battery needs a good device design that lasts several years without changing it. Many customers want a 10-year battery life in some applications, and some vendors even promise devices that last, sometimes more than 10 years. To achieve this, chipset designers make integrated circuits that use very little current in deep sleep modes. These devices have operation modes with low clock speeds, simple instruction sets, low battery voltages, and low current usage. These applications need to test how much battery drain they use at different current levels for events that take microseconds or milliseconds. 

Standards groups create new low-energy operating modes that use low RF power levels and simple connection protocols that limit how long the device is active to save on the high-power consumption of wireless communications. Wireless module manufacturers make the battery last longer by designing and testing programs for embedded processors that reduce the time spent in power-hungry states.

The product designer who combines sensing, processing, control, and communication components into a final product must understand how peripherals work and use power. This designer can control the power supplies, analog and mixed-signal components, and digital and RF subsystems with software or firmware. As the product is ready for production, a simpler set of tests and test equipment can check if the device works properly and cheaply. 
 

What are the best practices to optimize IoT battery life?

Finding the best balance between battery life and performance for IoT devices is a difficult and complex problem that involves considering different device designs, operation factors, and continuous battery drain analysis. Some of the common methods and recommendations for finding the best balance are:

• Select the right hardware components that fit the device's needs and features.
• Create procedures that can lower power usage and improve device performance, such as low-power modes.
• Select appropriate network protocols and parameters to reduce communication battery drain and increase network reliability, such as using low-power wireless technologies.
• Change device behavior to adapt to different environmental conditions and user selections.