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Low-Power Firmware Design for Battery IoT

A practical intermediate course for engineers shipping battery-powered IoT products. Covers MCU sleep modes (stop, standby, shutdown), peripheral power gating, duty-cycle architectures, protocol-level power trade-offs (BLE, LoRa, NB-IoT), and the measurement workflow to validate your design before a product ships.

Outcomes

  • Select and configure the right sleep mode for each phase of your device duty cycle
  • Design a power architecture that gates peripherals, manages wake sources, and minimizes quiescent current
  • Measure average current with a power profiler and validate against your battery life target

Audience

  • Firmware engineers building battery-powered IoT or wearable devices
  • Hardware-software co-design teams optimizing power budgets
  • Engineers debugging why a device that 'should last 2 years' lasts 3 weeks

Prerequisites

  • Embedded C and MCU peripheral familiarity (GPIO, timers, UART)
  • Basic understanding of IoT connectivity (BLE, Wi-Fi, or LPWAN)
  • Access to a development board with sleep mode support

Module list

Module 1

Power budget and measurement first

Set a realistic battery life target, build a current budget spreadsheet, and set up a Nordic PPK2 or Otii Arc to measure real current before optimizing.

Module 2

MCU sleep modes and wake sources

Map stop, standby, and shutdown modes for STM32/nRF/ESP32 families — what stays on, what resets, and how to restore state cleanly on wake.

Module 3

Peripheral power gating

Gate sensors, flash, and radios with load switches and enable pins — including sequencing rules that prevent brownout or I2C lockup.

Module 4

Duty-cycle architecture

Design a sample-transmit-sleep loop that minimizes active time, handles variable data rates, and survives missed wakeup events.

Module 5

Protocol power trade-offs and field validation

Compare BLE advertising intervals, LoRa spreading factors, and NB-IoT PSM timers — then validate the full system with a power trace before production.

Course body

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