The Current · Future Electronics

Optimizing Size and Efficiency for Lower Power Applications

·33 min·3 clips

Tim Kasky details how On Semi's RSL-10 draws just 25 nanoamps in sleep mode from a coin cell.

Low-power design starts with battery life, then immediately runs into all the awkward stuff around it. Todd Baker lays out the problem as efficient voltage regulation, smaller circuits, and the constant push to make embedded systems run longer. Batteries are better. Processors, microcontrollers, and radios sip less power than they used to. Still, the target keeps moving toward smaller packages and longer field life. The first example is wonderfully physical. Baker talks about a tire-pressure monitoring design for an 18-wheeler wheel, where a tiny sensor has to live inside the tire and handle serious g-force. Then the conversation shifts out to an agricultural field, where the host asks how OnSemi helps with sensor nodes collecting soil data for 10 years without anyone touching them. Healthcare brings the messier case. A guest describes wristbands for patients and sticky tags for hospital equipment, all talking to room gateways. Beacons transmit every couple seconds, saying where they are and what they are doing. That can feel a little intrusive, and the episode does not pretend otherwise. But hospitals are full of expensive equipment, urgent procedures, and people trying to coordinate under pressure. Knowing where assets and people move can expose whether the process is working. The engineering thread stays practical: these devices have to sit on patients, equipment, or remote nodes without constant battery swaps. Baker closes by pointing to personal health and public wellness uses, then directs engineers with similar design problems to Future Electronics.

As heard by us

A practical look at battery life, voltage regulation efficiency, and the size tradeoffs behind embedded systems.

Todd Baker treats battery life, voltage regulation efficiency, and package size as the core tensions in embedded design, and the tire-pressure monitoring example gives those tradeoffs real weight: a small sensor inside an 18-wheeler wheel has to survive heavy g-force, a…

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Why you'd press play

You need low-power design ideas for devices that have to last for years.

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