X8712A IoT Device Battery Life Optimization Solution

X8712A IoT Device Battery Life Optimization Solution

Battery, the Heart of IoT Devices

Wireless devices have increased by leaps and bounds over the years with the increasing adoption of wireless networking technologies across the globe. The demand for smart, connected devices is also fueling the growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices market. As such, battery life, time to market and product reliability are now more crucial than ever. For some medical or industrial IoT devices, life of users can be at stake if the battery does not live up to expectations. Some IoT devices do not have a low battery indicator, hence, users depend heavily on the warranted battery life specifications, making the battery life claim more crucial than ever. Hence, IoT device developers today face a monumental task starting from the product design up to design validation when it comes to estimating the device’s battery life and putting it down on paper for their customers.

Typical challenges include:

• How to measure the battery life to substantiate the battery life expectancy claim to customers? 
• What are the critical events that contribute to the power consumption and when frequently these events happen? What is the power consumption profile of your device’s typical operating cycle? 
• What design changes or tradeoffs to make to optimize battery life? 
• How to solve all the above with the least amount of time to meet project schedule?

As an R&D engineer for IoT devices, you need tools to help you quickly obtain deeper insights into your device’s design so that you can accelerate troubleshooting and design verification tasks.

The New Way to Perform Battery Drain Analysis

How event-based power analysis works

To easily estimate the battery life of your new IoT device, firstly, you need to determine what are the sub-systems that make up your device; for example, RF radio, display, beeper, vibrator etc., and how much current each subsystem will draw until your device’s battery runs out. The X8712A helps you determine the total power consumption of your device using the powerful Keysight X8712A-DPA DC Power Analyzer and its Source Measure Unit (SMU) and electronic load modules, RF event detector together with the KS833A2A PathWave Event-based Power Analysis Software. It captures RF and/or DC events from your IoT device, synchronously match the events to the current consumption and estimates the battery life of your device.