Precision measurement of the application-dependent current consumption of a wireless transceiver chip in the time and frequency domain

Abstract

Modern production concepts generate a demand for reliable, energy-efficient, fast, and secure wireless communication solutions. Therefore, the current consumption should not increase substantially due to additional cryptographic operations. This paper shows a principle current measurement method that is exemplary of a transceiver for the IO-Link Wireless protocol. Low-pass filtering and single-sided amplitude spectrum analysis are used to evaluate the main information of the current measurement. An uncertainty estimation is realized using statistical measurement data and considering the measurement setup in order to approximate the combined standard uncertainty. The results show that the current consumption only increases slightly when using additional cryptographic operations. This can be measured with acceptable uncertainty.