Accelerate the Development of Advanced Wearable Devices

Introduction

As advancements in cellular technology develops into 6G, additional capabilities like wireless sensing becomes more accessible as the networks use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher capacity and much lower latency. Wearable IoT devices will become an integral part of our daily lives. 

Stylish next-generation smart wearable devices will become smaller in size, have higher performance and higher reliability than ever before. Along with the demand, shorter time-to-market of these new devices will be an expectation.

With the improvement in the wearable device’s performance, the power consumption will increase alongside. As the device is never shutdown, it also continues to consume power in sleep mode. Therefore, the design of the wearable device needs to control power consumption and ensure it continues to be efficient throughout its operation, in any mode that it is in.

The reliability and efficiency of power consumption is especially important for the wearable devices that are used in medical or healthcare applications. These devices need to operate without any disruption, consistently and reliably for long durations, for example, to constantly monitor the patient’s conditions. To ensure the reliability of the wearable device, it is necessary for the development engineer to test the device over long periods of time to ensure that there are no anomalies detected in the critical signals that could cause a glitch or malfunction as well as track the power consumption to ensure consistency throughout the long operation.

Company:

• A world-leading multinational semiconductor company

Challenges:

• Building advanced power management schemes to achieve high performance and low power consumption.

• Reliable validation and debugging to achieve high device reliability.

• Faster time-to-market to secure competitive advantage.

Solutions:

• CX3300 Device Current Waveform Analyzer.

• CX3300’s powerful data analysis functions such as Current Profiler, Anomalous Waveform Analytics, and Waveform Trend Analyzer.

Results:

• Optimized power consumption quickly and easily.

• Found defects that were previously undetected.

• Introduced CX3300 more than 10 units in the R&D sites worldwide.

The Challenges

A world-leading multinational semiconductor company developing System-on-a-Chip (SoC) for advanced wearable devices at their various R&D sites. They faced three main challenges that we list here.

The first challenge was in building advanced power management schemes for high performance and low power consumption. The SoC has many functions and execute many tasks that consume power. It is necessary to optimize the power consumption by reducing the peak power and shortening the execution time of each task to achieve both high performance and low power device operations. The design needs to effortlessly switch between active modes and sleep modes. This is realized with intelligent software control. To validate the complicated power management system, it is necessary to characterize the current profiles across a wide range. This includes both sleep modes (nA level) and active modes (tens to hundreds mA level). To improve the efficiency and cost of the test setup, it is important to find one instrument that can support this wide range. The alternative is to connect multiple instruments to the device under test (DUT).

The second challenge was in the validation of the reliability of the wearable device and troubleshooting the device when reliability problems occur. As all device functions reference the input power, any glitch of the power during long operation or mode changes can cause unwanted operations. This is amplified with the increase in bus speeds and data transfer speeds and with the lower voltage levels in these wearable devices. The risk of device malfunctions due to miscommunication in the signal or data busses increase during the operation or mode changes. To validate or catch these anomalies, it is necessary to monitor the power busses through long operations. Since so much data is collected during these long durations, it is also important to quickly and automatically highlight anomalies seen, so that the troubleshooting efficiency can improve, consequently improving the device reliability.

The third challenge was in reducing the duration of the device design, validation, and debug stages. The speed of new technological innovations is increasing with each decade. Manufacturers need to design in these innovations into their product before new ones emerge, thus driving the product life cycle to constantly shorten. It is necessary to shorten time-to-market of the high performance and high reliability device to maintain competitive advantage.