What is it?
Power debugging is a methodology that provides software developers with information about how the software implementation in an embedded system affects system level power consumption. Because software controls the hardware including peripheral units, it also controls power consumption. By coupling source code to power consumption, testing and tuning for power optimization is enabled. This new dimension of software debugging is innovated by IAR Systems.
IAR Systems' power debugging technology samples the momentary current drawn by the system and feeds it to a power debug API where it is synchronized with time stamped debug information. This connects power consumption directly to the source code.
Why do you need it?
For battery operated embedded systems, low power consumption is a primary design objective. Power debugging has the capability to help developers extend battery life time in such systems by optimizing the software. Typically, the processor itself uses only a fraction of the available power resources whereas most is used by peripherals. Ensuring efficient use of peripherals is then a key to extending battery life time.
Implementing tools for power debugging in the development environment enables detection of design flaws causing unnecessary power consumption and unveils optimization opportunities for extending battery lifetime.
In-depth information
Voices
"The optimization of power consumption is an issue that concerns all types of systems, not just battery operated ones. In low-power operation modes where the processor is stopped, the consumption is directly linked to the hardware implementation. In active mode the power consumption efficiency is dependent on both hardware and software. IAR Systems' power debugger is a valuable tool that enables the customer to achieve aggressive power targets," comments Jacko Wilbrink, ARM Product Marketing Director at Atmel.
“With NXP’s focus on low-power silicon process and design techniques rapidly bringing down the power consumption of our 32-bit LPC microcontrollers, it’s great to see IAR Embedded Workbench become power-aware.” said Geoff Lees, vice president and general manager, microcontroller product line, NXP Semiconductors. “This now enables embedded designers to more easily profile their application power usage down to the function level, make interactive power and performance tradeoffs in an intuitive way, and meet ever tighter power budgets.”
"The launch of power debugging matches perfectly the introduction of the STM32 Ultra Low Power family, STM32L. With such a powerful tool, designers will easily fine tune their code to optimize performance, functionality and battery life of their applications in markets such as consumer, industrial, medical or metering", said Dominique Jugnon, STMicroelectronics Development Tools Manager.
"IAR Systems reinforces its position as one of the leading industry innovators with this power debugging approach to embedded development, benefitting embedded developers with insight into their application’s power consumption," said Wendell Smith, manager of marketing and applications for Stellaris® ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontrollers at Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI). "TI’s Stellaris family of microcontroller devices are ideally suited to low-power developments across a broad range of applications, and together with the power debugging tools incorporated in IAR Embedded Workbench, designers will now be able to optimize their code to achieve the lowest power consumption possible."
"The current release of power debugging tools supports the EFM32 Gecko development kits from Energy Micro. The onboard Advanced Energy Monitoring (AEM) of these kits simplifies and enhances the functionality of the IAR power debugger tools." Energy Micro CTO Øyvind Janbu commented, "As energy awareness is definitively an important aspect of code creation it is equally important that the development tools are able to reduce the debug and optimization efforts necessary. Energy Micro and IAR Systems worked together to bring designers the best software and hardware tools for energy efficient and low power applications."
“We designed the RX core to be best-in-class when it comes to performance, code and data density, and power consumption," said Ritesh Tyagi, director of product marketing, Consumer & Industrial Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America. “Traditional software development tools only address utilization of the first two design targets, but with the innovative power debugging technology from IAR Systems, embedded developers also can now stay in control of power consumption.”
“We have seen tremendous interest for our power debugging technology” said Stefan Skarin, CEO IAR Systems. “It shows that we are breaking new ground for designing low-power applications. We intend to keep innovating power debugging to provide developers with the best tools to develop low-power software for embedded systems.”