/diy/ - Do It Yourself

what is the best way to power a micro from a battery?
When the micro works with 5 volts it's a no brainer i can just hook up to a lipo directly and it lasts forever.
But problem is when the micro is 3v, or there is some other stuff on the board that is 3v, so what then?
I can use LDO, but those use consume current to work, and even if they use say 0.5ma to self power that is a massive waste of energy if rest of the circuit uses say 3ua in deep sleep (not to mention ldos need minimum current to work properly that is like 2ma usually)
Buck is also gay.. often when lipo is down to 3V the buck will output like 1.5V (or nothing), not to mention you have to put a ton of components to make a buck work or a whole separate pcb, and it also wastes too much power.
When the circuit is on 0.01% of the time it consumes 500ma so power wasted by ldo, or buck etc doesn't matter, the 5ma extra it uses is meaningless, but when the circuit sleeps 99.99% of the time and uses only 10ua on average than 2ma becomes a MASSIVE waste.
So wat do? smaller voltage battery? that presents its own issues