Power Breakdown Analysis of a WCDMA Handset with Multi-channel Power Monitoring System

Monitoring power consumption of a running system is a first step to determine where to take an effort on power optimization to minimize unnecessary idle time in available operation modes. Coordinating hardware and software architecture in a certain block or module to extend its lifetime requires system-wide power breakdown profiling, which then validates applicable power saving techniques because of a trade-off between cost and benefit. Experimental results show that with a commercial 3G WCDMA handset, a multi-channel power monitoring system gathers real-time traces of power consumption of the WCMDA MSM6250 chipset platform under several different conditions, and generates comprehensive power breakdown analysis to verify power saving techniques.