Using a switching power supply can extend battery life in an MSP430 application, as discussed in slyt356. The plot of active-mode current vs. voltage in figure 3 is useful, but there is no plot that considers sleep mode duty cycle, which would also be useful.
Is there a spice model of the MSP430s that models power consumption in the different sleep and active modes at different clock rates and voltages?
A SPICE model would aid us in determining how much is gained or lost by using a switching supply, based on our own use cases.
It would also be useful if there were a software simulator that can report how much power our application is using under different test cases, and also report the energy consumed by each subroutine, based on which peripherals it is using, and whether it is running from RAM or flash, etc. This would facilitate optimizations such as whether to calculate atan(theta) each time, or store the calculation in a lookup table.
Are there any online calculators that aid us in predicting MSP430 power consumption, aside from a SPICE model?
Hopefully such tools would help designers weigh the following options:
- Run at a high clock rate for a lower duty cycle
- Run at a low clock rate but a higher duty cycle
- Always run at the highest clock rate, with a switching supply
- Sample the battery voltage whenever coming out of sleep, and scale the clock for that battery voltage, decreasing the clock rate as the battery loses voltage.
Thanks.
