Prototyping Energy Harvesting Powered Systems with Nonvolatile Processor (Invited Paper)

摘要

Energy harvesting is a promising solution to power ubiquitous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. But the frequent and inevitable power failure incurs significant backup overhead, greatly degrading performance and energy efficiency. Nonvolatile processor (NVP), which can checkpoint processor states, is designed to tackle this problem. The conventional system-level design method involves repeated system modification and verification on hardware, in which measurement on hardware consumes the majority time. To expedite the NVP-based system design process, we propose a rapid system prototyping flow to eliminate repeated hardware measurement in the design flow. This method involves an NVP system-level simulator, which takes the harvester power trace, system characteristics extracted from hardware, and user design as the input, and analyzes system energy and time profile under this power trace. Iterative system optimization and verification are conducted on the simulator, with only the final verification on hardware. We demonstrate the advantages of this method by two design cases, in which time, energy efficiency and the impact of different capacitor size are optimized.