Browse > Article

A Load Emulator for Low-power Embedded Systems and Its Application  

Kim, Kwan-Ho (Department of Device Solution, Samsung Electronics)
Chang, Nae-Hyuck (School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University)
Publication Information
Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC / v.42, no.6, 2005 , pp. 37-48 More about this Journal
Abstract
The efficiency of power supply circuits such as DC-DC converters and batteries varies on the trend of the power consumption because their efficiencies are not fixed. To analyze the efficiency of power supply circuits, we need the temporal behavior of the power consumption of the loads, which is dependent on the activity factors of the devices during the operation. Since it is not easy to model every detail of those factors, one of the most accurate power consumption analyses of power supply circuits is measurement of a real system, which is expensive and time consuming. In this paper, we introduce an active load emulator for embedded systems which is capable of power measurement, logging, replaying and synthesis. We adopt a pattern recognition technique for data compression in that long-term behaviors of power consumption consist of numbers of repetitions of short-term behaviors, and the number of short-term behaviors is generally limited to a small number. We also devise a heterogeneous structure of active load elements so that low-speed, high-current active load elements and high-speed, low-current active load elements may emulate large amount and fast changing power consumption of digital systems. For the performance evaluation of our load emulator, we demonstrate power measurement and emulation of a hard drive. As an application of our load emulator, it is used for the analysis of a DC-DC converter efficiency and for the verification of a low-power frequency scaling policy for a real-time task.
Keywords
전력 측정;부하 에뮬레이션;DC-DC 변환기 효율;
Citations & Related Records
연도 인용수 순위
  • Reference
1 Sung Park, Andreas Savvides and Mani Srivastava, 'Battery capacity measurement and analysis using lithium coin cell battery,' in Proc. of ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISPLED01), pp. 382-387, 2001   DOI
2 John A. McNeil, Melinda Lawler and James Noon,'A 50A, 1us-RISE-TIME, PROGMMMABLE, ELECTRONIC LOAD INSTRUMENT FOR MEASUREMENT OF MICROPROCESSOR POWER SUPPLY TRANSIENT PERFORMANCE,' in Proc. of Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, vol. 1, pp. 410-414, 2000   DOI
3 M. Doyle, T.F. Fuller and J.S. Newman, 'Modeling of galvanostatic charge and discharge of lithium-ion insertion cells,' Journal of Electrochemical Society, vol. 141, no. 1, pp. 982-990, April 1994   DOI
4 J. Shaffer, J. Hamaker and J. Picone, 'The Visualization of Signal Processing Concepts,' in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 1853-1856, Seattle, Washington, USA, May 1998.   DOI
5 Guan-Chyun Hsieh, Jung-Chien Li, ' Design and implementation of an AC active load simulator circuit ', IEEE Trans. Aerospace and Electronic Systems, vol 29, pp. 157-165, 1993   DOI   ScienceOn
6 Daler Rakhmatov and Sarma Vrudhula, 'Energy Management for Battery-Powered Embedded Systems', ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, Vol. 2, No.3, pp. 227-324, August 2003   DOI
7 Chuang Zhang, Dongsheng Ma and Ashok Srivastava, 'Low power converter circuits: Integrated adaptive DC/DC conversion with adaptive pulse-train technique for low-ripple fast-response regulation,' in Proc. of ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISPLED04), pp. 257-262, 2004   DOI
8 Naehyuck Chang, Kwanho Kim and Hyun Gyu Lee, 'Cycle-accurate energy measurement and characterization: case study of ARM7TDMI,' in Proc. of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, Vol. 10, pp. 146-154, April 2002   DOI   ScienceOn
9 J. Russel and M. Jacone, 'Software Power Estimation and Optimization for High Perfomance, 32-bit Embedded Processors,' in Proc. of International Conference on Computer Design, pp328-333, Oct 1998.   DOI
10 V. Tiwari and M. T. Lee, 'Power analysis of a 32-bit embedded microcontroller', VLSI Design Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, 1998
11 Pai H. Chou, Chulsung Park, Jae Park, Kien Pham and Jinfeng Liu, 'B#: a battery emulator and power profiling instrument,' in Proc. of ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISPLED03), pp. 288-293, 2003   DOI