[jpnorair]

Excellent post -- a rarely understood truth. For low power wireless systems, still, though, the bulk of the energy is spent in TX and RX. But realistically the quiescent power drain still needs to be in the sub 5uW range to deliver long life on a small battery. A lot of GNSS and LTE SoC's standby in the 50uW range, which is just too much. Most of the LTE devices I've surveyed (M1, NB-IoT) are expected to be attached to MCUs, but they implement internally a small linux platform. Obviously, that makes it hard to get down to 5 uW.

[bsder]

> For low power wireless systems, still, though, the bulk of the energy is spent in TX and RX.

That is very highly dependent upon the system.

Some systems are all about leakage--these spend most of their lifetime on a shelf and a couple of days actually active.

Some systems are all about sensors or actuators and the communication is in the noise.

Some systems are all about calling home, and those require good TX consumption.