Power analysis software helps optimise battery life

Battery life for portable devices is important but optimising battery life can be challenging and time-consuming. R&D and design validation engineers need to capture power consumption by hardware subsystems and analyse how an IoT device behaves under a multitude of scenarios and climatic conditions.

They need to identify the necessary hardware design, software or firmware changes required to optimise battery life, and then repeat to verify the effects of each design change.

Keysight’s X8712A software, the KS833A2A Event-based Power Analysis software, enables these engineers to analyse an IoT device’s power consumption and delivers an accurate view of how the IoT device behaves to the subsystem level, as well as its charge consumption profile.

It offers an easy-to-use visualisation tool, via the company’s PathWave software, as well as new continuous data logging mode with measurement and data collection, enabling users to capture up to eight days of data to understand device behavior and charge consumption profiles over many operating cycles.

"Keysight's enhanced event-based power analysis software delivers three data capture modes for the X8712A IoT Device Battery Life Optimization solution," said Tan Boon Juan, vice president and general manager of Keysight's General Electronics Measurement business. "These modes provide the ability to capture high fidelity information and analyze fast events to the capability of defining a specific measurement duration time and capture very large amounts of data. Using a combination of these modes, users can expand their understanding of the operation of their IoT device to make informed design decisions to manage power efficiently and optimize their device for long battery life.”

The software enables users to view the current consumption profile to the subsystem level using single, triggered or continuous data capture modes to determine the amount of power consumed by the device and to quickly detect design weaknesses.

Keysight’s KS833A2A software offers the following key benefits:

• Ability to capture the dynamic current consumption of an IoT device as it transitions between active, idle or sleep modes with patented seamless current-ranging technology from A down to nA over several days generating an overview of the charge consumption profile.
• Automatic correlation of the charge consumption profile to the radio frequency/direct current (RF/DC) event of a subsystem, providing days of data measurement and collection, as well as a graphical view to simplify post measurement analysis.
• Automatic calculation of battery life based on the charge consumption profile, eliminating manual calculation efforts and speeding analysis time.
• Easy re-testing to verify design changes and the impact to battery life.
• Quantify, systematically and objectively, the improvement in current consumption to compare the behaviour of different software, firmware or hardware builds.
  

Keysight’s X8712A software subscription licenses are available now.