ESP32 S3 WROOM + WiFi Power usage

[leafmuncher]

I have two nearly identical boards, one with ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N8R8 and the other ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N8R2 and I'm using Nordic Power Profiler Kit II to observe power consumption. In both cases, WiFi is enabled but no active data transfer is occurring, and I'm just looping and sleeping.

What I see is with the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N8R2 is lower power spikes than with the N8R8.

Questions:

- Is this expected? Section 4.4.2 says "Please note that if the chip embedded has in-package PSRAM, the current consumption of the module might be higher compared to the measurements below" but there aren't any specifics.
- On the board with N8R8 I'm seeing the occasional reset due to brownout, might this be due to the fact that I only have 100nF decoupling cap on the ESP32 package? The WROOM dev kit has a 10uF capacitor there along with 100nF.

Thanks!

ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N8R2

Old (WiFi).png (151.37 KiB) Viewed 19977 times

ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N8R8

New (WiFi).png (144.94 KiB) Viewed 19977 times

[ESP_Sprite]

Could be anything, honestly. Those are very high and short spikes, and as such easily blunted by some extra capacitance, some inductance on the power lines etc. Additionally, they're dependent on what the chip is sending over WiFi, and depending on lots of things, one chip may have decided it needs more Tx power than the other.