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Increase battery life, reduce current drain and simulate batteries of IoT devices
Maximizing Battery Life of IoT Devices
By Minimizing Load Current Draw
The Challenge of Measuring Low IoT Currents
To maximize battery life, your product current draw must be kept to an absolute minimum. This requires that you use low power components and efficient techniques to de-energize components when they are not in use. You need sensitive measurement instrumentation to measure current levels as low as nA.
Determine the load current profile
It can be difficult to characterize the load current profile of a prototype IoT device, because you must measure the current in a wide range of operating states:
- sleep mode (from nA to µA),
- standby modes (from hundreds of microamps to tens of milliamps), and
- active states (from milliamps to amps), including short current bursts due to wireless transmissions
To accurately capture these widely varying load current levels, you need an exceptional measurement solution that includes:
- A wide current measurement range, from hundreds of nanoamps to amps
- The measurement speed to capture current pulses just a few microseconds wide
- A large memory buffer to store the prototype device’s current profile
Keithley’s DMM7510 7½-digit Graphical Sampling Multimeter is well-equipped to meet these demands, as it offers:
- pA current sensitivity
- 1 Msample/s sampling
- 27 M data points of memory
Watch now to learn how to solve the IoT measurement challenges.
Simulate any battery type
How low can the battery voltage drop before your IoT device turns off? Gauging battery performance at different stages of battery discharge is difficult, as it requires instrumentation that can accurately simulate battery performance.
To address this, Keithley’s 2281S-20-6 Battery Simulator makes it easy to model any type of battery. It allows you to efficiently test prototype IoT devices in any battery state, with high repeatability to effectively estimate battery life. Combining a 2281S-20-6 Battery Simulator with a DMM7510 Graphical Sampling Multimeter will give you a complete solution for assessing power consumption and battery life of your IoT prototypes.
Program the battery simulator for any state of charge, such as near the completely discharged state, to determine how a product performs under a low battery condition and to determine the low battery shut-off voltage.
Model any type of battery
Create any battery model.
The final piece of the puzzle is to create a model for the battery that powers your IoT device. Keithley’s 2450 or 2460 Graphical SourceMeter® Source Measure Unit (SMU) instruments make it easy to create the model for the battery used by your product.
A battery model-generating script operates the SMU instrument as a controlled current load and derives the model parameters.
Featured Content
Determining the Average Current of an IoT Device
Video
This video shows how a graphical sampling digital multimeter can capture the current drain in all states of an IoT product from the low power sleep mode to the full power transmit mode, load current burst.
Measuring Ultra-Low Power in Wireless Sensor Nodes
Application Note
This application note provides information on how to characterize the power consumption of a wireless sensor node.
Determine Load Current Profile
DMM7510
The DMM7510 delivers a wide current measurement range, picoamp current sensitivity, high speed sampling, and a 27 million reading memory buffer to measure and store a prototype device’s current profile.
- 1 Msamples/s current digitizer
- 100 pA – 10 A measurement range
- 27 million reading storage
- µA current triggering
- Touchscreen with graphical display
Simulate Any Battery
2281S
Model any type of battery required to test devices efficiently and repeatably at any battery state. Also ideal for estimating battery life effectively is the combinination of a 2281S-20-6 with a DMM7510 to provide a complete solution for power consumption/battery life assessment.
- 20 V, 6 A, 120 W capacity
- Simulates battery output using dynamic models
- Displays, Voc, SOC, Amp-Hr, and internal resistance
- Display visualization of battery state
Model Any Type of Battery
2450 and 2460 SMU Instruments
These SMU instruments can operate as a sensitive, electronic load to discharge a battery. In adddition, the SMUs can execute test scripts to monitor battery drain and create a model-generating script that lets them operate as a constant current load and derive the model parameters.
- Constant voltage or constant current sourcing or sinking (four-quadrant operation)
- Up to 200 V, 7 A, 200 W
- Battery model application
