Low quiescent current is an extended battery system

What are the benefits of low quiescent current?

Recently, Wang Shibin, TI's battery management system product line manager, introduced relevant knowledge in the field of quiescent current. Low Iq plays a key role in extending battery life and storage time, enabling more functionality, extending system life, and reducing system costs.

Wang Shibin said that the service life of rechargeable batteries is limited. Based on the standard life of lithium batteries of 500 charges and discharges, if the number of charges is increased from one day to two days, its service life will be greatly extended.

There are two main aspects of reducing system power consumption. One is to reduce operating power consumption, and the other is to reduce standby power consumption. For most IoT devices, their working time is not long, so how to reduce standby power consumption is an important factor affecting battery capacity.

If the quiescent current can be lowered, the system may even only need to use disposable batteries, which reduces battery costs and reduces the total maintenance cost during the system life cycle.

More importantly, low Iq can speed up the system development cycle. Wang Shibin said that generally designers need to calculate the quiescent current when designing the overall system. In the past, when the quiescent current was high, they needed to optimize the system, software and operating mode. Nowadays, the use of Texas Instruments low Iq product series can save the time of calculation and repeated adjustments, as well as the additional considerations of device selection.

Low Iq technology covers all major power supply product lines

Wang Shibin introduced that TI’s power product line has six major series, including step-down DC/DC switching regulators; power switches, interfaces and lighting; battery management; boost, multi-channel/phase DC/DC converters; Linear power supplies as well as high voltage power supplies. In addition to high-voltage power supplies, there are also battery-related products. This year, TI has launched a variety of ultra-low quiescent current products for DC/DC switching regulators, charge management, LDO and voltage monitoring series. The quiescent current is reduced by several to dozens of times, reaching the nA level, basically achieving the so-called "zero power consumption" standby.

Wang Shibin said that TI has upgraded its products from multiple angles such as circuit design improvements, process improvements, and packaging technology updates. "For circuits, the first thing is to make the basic circuit better, so that all low-Iq products can be used, and the second thing is to modify individual circuits carefully for each specific application." Wang Shibin said, "For example, in LDO products, Make the reference voltage more accurate and lower, reduce the power consumption of the amplifier circuit, and also ensure a fast response time. For DC/DC circuits, what needs attention may become the PWM or DCS control circuit .”

When talking about whether to use a discrete power chip or consider an MCU with integrated power IP, Wang Shibin believes that it still depends on the specific scenario. Non-integrated solutions have better performance and are easier to differentiate. For example, if you add some separate modules to a watch, you can use a low-Iq power chip without adding additional power consumption burden to the system.