Keysight Targets the Battery-Powered Internet of Things with New Bench-Top Battery Emulator

Keysight Technologies has announced the launch of a tool designed to emulate and profile batteries, with a view to helping hardware designers get their Internet of Things (IoT) device power draw under control.

"The Keysight E36731A Battery Emulator and Profiler offers a valuable solution to design engineers who want to enhance their device designs," claims Keysight's Carol Leh. "Rather than relying on intricate and time-consuming manual tests, the emulator allows engineers to quickly identify the current drain effect of critical factors such as hardware changes, software updates, and temperature changes. This way, engineers can save time and improve their device designs by using an emulated battery for testing, without the need for physical batteries."

The idea behind the tool: that the billions of IoT devices hitting the market today will need to be careful about their energy usage, both individually so as not to strain their batteries and collectively to avoid wasting excessive power. Rather than hooking up a real-world battery to a device for testing, the Keysight E36731A acts as an emulated battery — offering real-time feedback on power usage and devices' interactions with batteries of varying capacity and voltage.

Combined with the battery test and emulation capabilities of Keysight's PathWave BenchVue software, the device allows for the generation of battery profiles, including linking profiles to age and temperature, emulates batteries of arbitrary sizes, and provides automated run-down and cycle testing. It's also suitable for relatively high-power devices, putting out up to 200W of power, with measurements tracked down to microamps.

The E36731A is now available to order from Keysight direct, at an admittedly pricey $4,736 — plus $845.42 for a 12-month license to the PathWave BenchVue battery test and emulation software.