{"id":3220,"date":"2012-06-26T10:42:50","date_gmt":"2012-06-26T09:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=3220"},"modified":"2012-06-26T10:42:50","modified_gmt":"2012-06-26T09:42:50","slug":"power-suckers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2012\/06\/26\/power-suckers\/","title":{"rendered":"Power Suckers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have often observed that the world of embedded software is usually dominated by a small number of &#8220;fashionable&#8221; topics &#8211; technology that everybody is talking and\/or concerned about. The key one just now, which I have discussed <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/blog\/2011\/04\/04\/why-does-power-matter\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">before<\/a>, is the influence that software has on device power consumption. This is a topic to which I will certainly return.<\/p>\n<p>A number of the Mentor Embedded team were at the Freescale Technology Forum [FTF] last week and my colleague <a href=\"mailto:kamran_shah@mentor.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kamran Shah<\/a> has written a guest blog about some of the fun that they had there, while talking about low power design &#8230;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Last week was the 2012 Freescale Technology Forum in San Antonio, Texas. As you can expect, it was warm and humid if you ventured outside, but most of the day was spent indoors, in technical sessions and the floor of the Technology Lab. For the Mentor Embedded team it was also our first showcase of new power management functionality in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mentor.com\/embedded-software\/nucleus\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nucleus RTOS<\/a>. Specifically the addition of hibernate and standby mode support to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mentor.com\/embedded-software\/nucleus\/power-management\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">power management framework<\/a> in Nucleus. So let\u2019s start with some power measurements our engineering team took on what this means to an embedded design and then we\u2019ll share some fun we had at the show promoting this capability.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2012\/06\/SoC-current-consumption.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3224 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2012\/06\/SoC-current-consumption-520x277.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"520\" height=\"277\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The table above shows measured current consumption on a Freescale i.mx 28 part. As you can see here it\u2019s important to operate at most efficient operating point for your application. And it isn\u2019t just about how long your application can run but also about the physical design and longevity of your embedded system. We can consider a battery powered device to see what the &#8220;how long can I run my application&#8221; number look like with some hypothetical operating scenarios:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Scenario 1 \u2013 Device Operating at OP#3 100% of the time<\/li>\n<li>Scenario 2 \u2013 Device Operating at OP#3 50% of the time, OP#1 25% of the time, Standby 20% of the time, Hibernate 5% of the time<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Assuming a AA Battery has 1050 mAh here\u2019s what we\u2019d see for how long our hypothetical devices would operate on 2 AA batteries (2100 mAh total):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Scenario 1 \u2013 4.5 hours<\/li>\n<li>Scenario 2 \u2013 7.3 Hours<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That\u2019s truly hypothetical, but not made up since I didn\u2019t come up with some 2x factor. \ud83d\ude42 Having your application behave in this manner isn\u2019t simple and it\u2019s something the Nucleus engineering team has been focusing on for a while. We created a &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JIjWJ95b44c\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">marketing video<\/a>&#8221; to convey what our goal is with the power management framework: to make it easy for embedded software developers to take advantage of the power saving features in todays SoCs.<\/p>\n<p>We decided to have some fun at FTF and handed out some stickers to attendees and if they were seen with the stickers they\u2019d be rewarded with a t-shirt &#8230; a VERY LOUD t-shirt. Oh, the sticker also has a URL that you might want to visit &#8230; trust me.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2012\/06\/T-shirts.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3232 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2012\/06\/T-shirts-520x390.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"312\" height=\"234\" \/><\/a>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/powersuckers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3236 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2012\/06\/sticker-520x693.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"364\" height=\"485\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>People loved the design or hated it, guess that\u2019s the point. Whether you like the t-shirt design or not, you\u2019ll hopefully find the lower power management features in Nucleus useful in your next embedded design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have often observed that the world of embedded software is usually dominated by a small number of &#8220;fashionable&#8221; topics&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[300,381,471,308,304,374,309],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-embedded-software","tag-freescale","tag-ftf","tag-low-power","tag-nucleus","tag-nucleus-os","tag-rtos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}