Industry Expert Blogs

With this post, I would like to continue the topic of my earlier post “Can we stop power-hungry bugs from clawing their way through application software stacks?” In my previous post, I wrote about the difficulties software developers face with writing battery friendly software. I indicated that virtual prototypes (VPs) can address many of those challenges by providing visibility into the energy consumption of the software under development. Now, I would like to shed some light on how virtual prototypes can accomplish this.

In order to give software developers the ability to profile the impact of software changes on energy consumption, the underlying execution target needs to expose the energy consumed by the different components that make up the system – over time and ideally through the perspective of software activity. Therefore, the profiling environment needs to be able to quantify the energy contribution from the different platform components.  However, development boards with power measurement probes are only accessible for a handful of software engineers, and are typically made available too late in the design cycle to allow development and testing of the power management software functions.  Moreover, they are not available to the community of application software providers whose software has significant influence on a battery’s mileage.

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