Microcontroller Power Consumption Measurement Based on PSoC

Microcontrollers are often used as central processing elements in embedded systems. Because of different sleep and performance modes that microcontrollers support, their power consumption may have a high dynamic range, over 100 dB. In this paper, a data acquisition (DAQ) system for measuring and analyzing the power consumption of microcontrollers is presented. DAQ system consists of a current measurement circuit using potentiostat technique, a DAQ device based on system on chip PSoC 5LP and Python PC program for the analysis, storage and visualization of measured data. Both Successive Approximation Register (SAR) and Delta-Sigma (DS) ADCs contained in the PSoC 5LP are used for measuring voltage drop across the shunt resistor. SAR ADC samples data at a 10 times higher rate than DS ADC, so the input range of DS ADC can be adjusted based on data measured by SAR ADC, thus enabling the extension of current measuring range by 28%. Implemented DAQ device is connected with a computer through a USB port and tested with developed Python PC program