PowerViews

Conferences and Forums

October 22, 2012

Integrated System-Level Power Management: Key to meet consumer expectations for battery life in portable products

Charles Limonard
Product Marketing Manager, Dialog Semiconductor

Power Channels: Batteries and Portable Power, Communications Power, Energy Efficiency, European Power News, Packaging and Cooling, Power Components, Switch-Mode Power

It's commonly acknowledged that consumers are demanding ever smarter, smaller and thinner electronic products but designers of such devices continue to be faced with a simultaneous demand for extended battery life. Some mobile phones of 10 years ago could be used for a week on a single battery charge. Today, battery technology is struggling to keep up and few products will operate for more than a day in typical usage without needing to be re-charged. Battery capacity growth has only been around 11% per annum in recent years and there’s little sign of it accelerating. But smartphones, tablet computers and notepads provide performance and functionality that was hard to imagine decade ago: full color, high resolution touch screens, multiple wireless transceivers and receivers, multi-Gigabyte memories and near field communications (NFC) functions all take their toll on energy consumption. Total power consumption grows with every incremental increase, however small, as more functions are added.

With the growing complexity of consumer electronic devices, the idea that each circuit function can have its own discrete power management circuit is rapidly becoming obsolete. Effective power management demands a system-level approach and an in-depth understanding of how application processors and their respective peripherals interact with each other. How do various circuit functions communicate? When is processor intervention needed, and under what circumstances can it be left in a sleep mode? What are the implications of adopting different sleep modes? How fast can the processor be woken up? Does the supply voltage for a circuit need to be constant, or can it be varied to save energy, depending on operating conditions? What does “always on” connectivity mean for energy management best practice? Only with an understanding of these issues and more can the product designer hope to be able to minimize system energy consumption. And, as battery life is a key determinant of consumer choice, developing an optimal energy management system is now critical to the market success of consumer electronic devices.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that while we commonly talk about “power management”, it’s actually “energy management” that’s at issue here – energy consumption being the product of power consumption and time. Clearly, the time during which individual circuits are powered up has a major impact on battery life, as does the sequence in which functions are turned on and off, and the speed of sequencing. In many instances the peak current required by a processor can be up to ten times the average current. The better the power management circuit can manage that peak, keeping its duration to the minimum required, the more effective is the overall energy management of the system.

Trying to manage all the possible operating scenarios of a smartphone, tablet computer or other portable electronic product, has now become so complex that discrete analogue power management components with separate digital controllers are no longer viable. This approach is too costly in terms of bill-of-materials, product assembly and board space consumed, and it cannot deliver the performance or functionality of a dedicated power management IC (PMIC).

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