1. Introduction

1.1. Overview

The DA1469x is a family of multi-core wireless microcontrollers, combining the latest ARM Cortex M33 application processor with floating-point unit, advanced power management functionality, a cryptographic security engine, analog and digital peripherals, a dedicated sensor node controller, and a software configurable protocol engine with a radio that is compliant to the Bluetooth® 5.1 low energy standard. It is a complete solution with all the power supplies needed (DCDC, LDOs, Battery Charger) all in one package.

The purpose of this document is to describe the procedure of performing measurements of power consumption for the DA1469x family products. The measurements described in this document are performed by default on the DA1469x ProDK daughterboard (stand-alone), however there are also some hardware configurations in case the reader wants to try to measure it while it is still mounted on the motherboard. It is strongly advised to measure it while the daughterboard is detached from the motherboard to avoid any possible current leakages.

Dialog provides an embedded tool in the ProDK Motherboard which is capable of measuring power consumption, called Power Profiler. It is very accurate for measurements where the device is active but it shows less accurate results when measuring extremely low currents, for example when the device is in any sleep mode. For this purpose, for the tests conducted for this document, Agilent’s N6705B power analyzer was used.

Additionally, this document covers the preparation of the hardware and equipment needed for the measurements. It also provides information which parameters need to be altered. The document also describes how this needs to be done in the software examples provided by Dialog Semiconductor, in order to acquire accurate measurements for realistic use case scenarios.

Finally at the end of this document, the reader can find indicative measurement results of the various scenarios described in Chapter 2, as well as some suggestions for related documents and tutorials that could provide further insight in relative subjects.