In-House Tools for Low-Power Embedded Systems

摘要

Power consumption emerged as a distinct axis for system optimization especially for battery operated applications. Most of all, circuit and device level low-power design has leveraged battery-operated embedded systems over dozens of years. As of today, high-level or system-level power reduction is believed for another significant power saving opportunity. Nevertheless, existing power-related tools are not familiar with system and software designers, who have to pay more attention to power consumption than other optimization factors. In this paper, we introduce a series of power measurement and estimation tools that differentiate the quality and effectiveness of high-level power reduction practices for embedded systems. To fulfill necessary requirement for high-level power reduction, we have developed a cycle-accurate energy measurement technique using switched capacitors. This new technique enabled us to develop innovative power measurement tools for memory devices, FPGAs and CPUs. This individual power measurement tools contribute quality energy characterization of components, and eventually come up with an integrated system-level power estimation tool: SEE (Seoul National University Energy Explorer, http://see.snu.ac.kr).