Automate Mobile Device Battery Drain Analysis
February 2008
Employing battery current drain analysis tools and techniques for battery-life testing allows you to optimize designs for maximum battery run time. Capturing and analyzing battery performance data in early design work reduces the more costly and time consuming re-work required to fix problems once a phone is undergoing interoperability testing or deployed to customers.
Agilent’s new, automated battery drain analysis solutions using the 8960’s real world emulation capabilities make it possible to optimize your design for battery drain performance while still meeting important time to market goals.
Several options are available for automating battery drain analysis with the 8960. The most basic solution uses the Agilent 14565B device characterization software. This software automates Agilent power sources for battery current drain capture and analysis.
Capabilities include:
- Battery emulation sourcing
- Specialized measurement system for current drain
- Current waveform capture and analysis
- Long-term current drain data logging and analysis
- Long-term current drain capture and statistical analysis
- Automated program control from other software packages
Often it’s desirable to make current drain measurements that are synchronized to the activity of the device under test, which is under the control of another test program. For example, you may want to validate the current drain of a mobile phone for all of its RF transmit power levels and channels, or while it performs multiple activities such as FTPing files and sending multiple SMS messages. Performing this task manually is time-consuming and laborious.
The N5970A Interactive Functional Test (IFT) software or N6568C Wireless Test Manager (WTM) software can be used in conjunction with the 14565B software. These software products act as the user and network stimulus that drives the battery drain behavior of the phone. They provide a test executive, technology-specific tests, easy-to-use interfaces, Visual Basic or Visual Basic.NET programming, and Windows PC compatibility.
Battery Drain Analysis with Automated Functional Test
The newly introduced N5970A IFT software is used to simultaneously execute various activities such as ftp, http, and UDP downloads, call processing, SMS/MMS messages, simulation of network movement, handovers and more. By executing realistic user scenarios, the impact on the battery performance and battery life becomes more realistic. Performing this testing in the lab reduces time spent drive testing a real network.
Battery Drain Analysis with Automated RF Test
The N6568C WTM software automates handovers, power level changes, and UE RF parametric tests including transmitter power and receiver quality measurements. It also commands the 14565B device characterization software to set up, make, and then return current drain measurements to the WTM for each sequence step, greatly simplifying this time-consuming and laborious measurement task.
Instrument configurations for battery drain analysis with the 8960 are shown below.
For more information on these solutions:
Read an application note about this subject
Visit our product pages:
www.agilent.com/find/N5970A
www.agilent.com/find/WTM
www.agilent.com/find/14565B
Battery Drain Analysis with Automated RF Test (click to enlarge)
Battery Drain Analysis with Automated Functional Test (click to enlarge)
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Product specifications, descriptions, and prices in this document subject to change without notice.
