IAR pioneers Power reduction debugging

IAR Systems announced an innovative technology specifically designed to enable software developers to reduce power consumption in embedded systems. With a rapidly increasing demand for low-power solutions in embedded systems, the new IAR Systems technology signifies a great leap in embedded software development, and advances the product leadership of the company. The technology will start with new functionality in our world-leading product IAR Embedded Workbench, and will continue with additional products and solutions as an integrated part of our core technology.

The new functionality in IAR Embedded Workbench works by coupling power consumption directly to the application software, and enables the developer to analyze power consumption and correlate it with program execution. Using this approach, developers can tune and optimize the application’s power profile. Oscilloscopes are commonly used to display and measure power consumption, but the new functionality helps the developer to actually connect the power consumption to what is happening in the software. The functionality also dramatically reduces the effort required to identify the underlying causes of a power glitch. 

What is power debugging?

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.

Why use power debugging?

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.

How can power debugging reduce power consumption?

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. A typical example of such a tool is a "power profiler" that shows where the application has consumed power and how much. Compare this to a traditional software profiler that describes where in the source code an application has spent its time.

How does it work?

The power debugging technology currently under development by IAR Systems 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.
 
“We have seen a growing interest among our customers for a means to reduce power consumption. Announcing the new functionality is the first step in our strategy to introduce innovations for low-power embedded software development by leveraging on our world-class core technology in IAR Embedded Workbench” said Stefan Skarin, CEO of IAR Systems. “We are committed to pioneering low-power debugging and I believe that most of our customers will benefit from the new technology and the new functionality in our products.”

IAR Systems will start including the technology with new functionality in IAR Embedded Workbench later in 2010.

05-05-2010