The smarter systems get, the more they are run by some kind of processor running code. So system functions that might have been controlled by circuitry and logic in the past are now turned on and off based on instructions in the system control code. So the power consumption of your system can depend highly on the code that’s running.

This is true even for the processor itself, whose power can depend on how your code runs. IAR has already had a solution for that, called I-scope, that you could use with their I-jet debugging pod to figure out what code was executing when some power event happened.

Well they’ve just extended that capability beyond the processor. You can now, theoretically, probe any points of interest on the board to figure out where power is going and then correlate that back to the code that’s executing. I say “theoretically” because you can’t simply probe a random node; you have to provision the board with a low-value shunt resistor for each power line you want to be able to probe. This provides the ΔV that the probe can measure to develop a power profile.

You can learn more by checking their release.