

Analog Devices ADP172

Analog Devices is playing in this field, too. Their ADP172 regulator offers an input voltage down to 1.6 V and has a 50 mV drop out, and under a microamp of shutdown current. Think of the possibilities in systems powered by LiMnO2 batteries. It's available in a 1 mm square four ball WLCSP package. I have a couple and want to do some prototyping, but have no idea how I'll solder to them.Measuring power consumption

Vendors have been providing tools to measure power consumption and, insome cases, relate it to the code. I've reviewed a number of these, likethe REAL Ice Power Monitor from Microchip,Agilent's N2820A current probe,IAR's I-Jet,the uCurrent,and the Real Time Current Monitor.Now that battery operation is hugely important for so many systems it'sclear that these sorts of tools will become very important.

REAL Ice Power Monitor from Microchip (above).

Agilent's N2820A current probe connected to a scope and eval board (below).

Trillion sensors

This year Fairchild Semiconductor predicted that there will be atrillion sensors deployed by 2020. Smart phones now have all sorts ofstrange sensors on-board, like humidity detectors, which are there inthe hopes that some bright developer will use them to create a killerapp. It's a strange market when a product is sold to the masses without aclear idea why some of the components are on the board. (Madman Muntzmade his fortune the opposite way, cutting components out of his TVsuntil they stopped working.) InvenSense, for instance, sells a lot ofmotion and sound sensors, including a nine axis (3-axis gyroscope,3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis compass) device with on on-board motionprocessor IC that has a simple I2C interface. The future will seeus surrounded by a field of sensors connected to very low power, butquite capable, MCUs.



Sensor from InvenSense .

Software

On the software front, LDRA unbundled their unit testing software.LDRAunit is available for a price on the par of a decent IDE. It does a basispath analysis of all, or a subset, of the functions in a program andgenerates all of the unit tests. It will even create MC/DC tests. Ihave seen a 10KLOC program that required 50KLOC of unit tests. The costsavings from automatically generating the unit tests can be staggering.



Click on image to enlarge.

LDRAunit screen.