I have worked on various designs in the last 2 years have gained a good amount of knowledge in low power embedded systems design space. Have designed products whose average current was below 25uA (I am yet to achieve the next milestone which will be <2.5uA) and worked for 6 months on a single battery charge.
I have collected all the points that I have considered in my various designs in an article so that they can be useful for others.
In low power design, it is not always just about picking the lowest power MCU. The best strategy which helps me a lot was to think like a detective and consider every uA matters and find all circuits/code where there is a scope of reducing even 1uA.
I have reviewed more than 10 designed for my clients in the past few months and I am surprised to see bad power supply design, either using LDO or high IQ converter and expecting the lowest possible power consumption :)
This forum is dedicated to low power so I thought of sharing the article here: https://pallavaggarwal.in/10-tips-for-low-power-embedded-system-design/
I hope some of the engineers will find it useful. I am also hoping to learn from others if they can share which techniques helped them the most.
Best Regards,
Pallav Aggarwal
Nice, I'm fairly new to a lot of this but have an idea of the basics - so for someone like me this looks really readable and helpful! The power draw on floating pins was something I hadn't realized, for instance.
I've been trying to figure out a good way to power down i2c devices; apparently they might need to be decoupled from SCL and SDA in addition to turning the power off. That would be an interesting topic to see!
Quote from: Pallav Aggarwal on September 04, 2021, 02:58:17 PM
I am also hoping to learn from others if they can share which techniques helped them the most.
It might be a good idea to read the earlier posts on low power. The techniques discussed there enable building a Mote that will last well over 2 years on a battery. I have one AtMega328P TH Mote in my house that has been running continuously since May 2019 on a single CR2032 using the designs developed from these discussions.