IWR1443: options of low power consumption mode

Hello Hayden,
In your previous post I referenced you to the reference design for level sensing, www.ti.com/.../TIDEP-0091
There is not a specific lower power mode, it is part of a system design.

a) RF /system design - are we interested in Range, Range resolution, Velocity, velocity resolution, angle?
if this is a 1443/ (1642), there can be additional Hardware Accelerator-R4F / (DSP) processing for object detection
how many Tx and Rx antennas are needed
note: for low power - some tradeoffs in system design are needed

b) in some instances, for low power we want to have a HOST processor, that controls power management, and we load-switch the Radar sensor

c) some additional areas include how much power is used for booting, RF calibration, and RF measurement. In your other post today, ES3.0 IWr1443, and ES2.0 IWR1642 devices will have the BSS code in ROM, instead of needing to load the code from flash. Also the QSPI speed is increased to 40Mbps, so that code Boot takes less time and power. In the mmWave Link APIs under the mmWave SDK, you will find RF Initialization, which normally performs a complete calibration, this will be optimized in the future to perform partial calibrations, with some QSPI or host storage of calibration parameters. Related to the measurement, this ties to the application.

d) there are tradeoffs for how much RF energy needs to reflect off the target object(s) , and how often. Each Tx has a transmit power backoff, which can reduce the power. If the desired Complex 1x sample rate is below 6.25Msps, the ADC(s) can be sampled at 1/2 speed to provide a power reduction. In the IWr1443, there is a tradeoff of using the Hardware Accelerator for FFTs, and CFAR detection, instead of R4F ARM software. In some cases, offloading the IQ or I data from the Radar Receiver to an external HOST over the CSI-2/LVDS interface, reduces the power consumed by the radar sensor, but then the post processing is done by another device.

You can use the mmWave Sensing Estimator, to have an engineering set of values, for (a), in low power applications, if the DSP is not required, we would select the IWR1443. training.ti.com/mmwave-sensing-estimator-overview

You can then using the mmWave SDK program the Out of Box Demo, to the IWr1443 EVM, and using the mmWave Demo Visualizer, you can adjust the radar parameters, to check your distance, velocity, elevation, object detection system design.  The mmWave Demo Visualizer can be found here, https://dev.ti.com/gallery/view/534566/mmWave_Demo_Visualizer/

At this point you would need to modify the Out of Box Demo, to directly program the CLI parameters as part of your MSS application. You can use specific hardware triggers to time your application, PMIC_Enable - can be brought out to an external 3.3v IO to GND, GPIO0 can be set at the beginning of your application, and reset at the end of the measurement. HOST Interrupt can be set at the completion of the Boot Phase, cleared when you are ready to make a measurement, and set again at the measurement completion. You can then modify the CLI parameter options, or your system design. Use a current sensor for the 5v input to the PMIC, you can then instrument, and refine your application.

Regards,
Joe Quintal