Design Lower-Power Embedded Products

Consumers are demanding lower-power products. This environmentally friendly attitude requires embedded designers to think about product battery life, cycle time, and battery disposal. Together with NI, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) has announced EnergyBench, a tool that provides data, known as an Energymark score, on the amount of energy a microprocessor-based embedded design consumes while running EEMBC’s performance benchmarks. Many silicon processor manufacturers use the EEMBC-certified Energymark score to indicate a processor’s use of power and energy. To make EnergyBench universal, EEMBC has standardized on the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment and NI data acquisition hardware.

With EnergyBench, design engineers can gather real-time information on energy consumption of microprocessor-based designs.

Every processor typically has its own power measurement methods, so it is nearly impossible for a hardware engineer to make accurate comparisons between vendors. Many processors offer “typical” power specifications on product data sheets that are difficult to compare. The problem is exacerbated during the design process when software engineers code processor system on-a-chip implementations. EnergyBench provides data on the amount of energy a processor consumes when running a real application workload and not just arbitrarily chosen test vectors.

EnergyBench gives insight into the power cost of a device’s performance by deriving a performance-energy number using the consolidated performance score in each benchmark suite. For example, EnergyBench calculates a netmarks-per-Joule score for devices tested against EEMBC’s networking benchmarks.

View the EEMBC-recommended equipment to couple with EnergyBench.

This article first appeared in the Q3 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter. 

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