SEProf: A high-level software energy profiling tool for an embedded processor enabling power management functions

Energy efficiency has become one of the most important design issues for embedded systems. To examine the power consumption of an embedded system, an energy profiling tool is highly demanded. Although a number of energy profiling tools have been proposed, they are not directly applicable to the embedded processors with power management functions that are widely utilized in battery-operated embedded systems to reduce power consumption. Hence, this study presents a high-level energy profiling tool, called SEProf, that estimates the energy consumption of an embedded system running multithread software and a multitasking operating system (OS) that supports power management functions. This study implements the proposed SEProf in Linux 2.6.19 and evaluates its performance on an ARM11 MPCore processor. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tool can provide accurate energy profiling results with a low profiling overhead.

► We proposed and implemented an energy profiling tool called SEProf for embedded processors with power management functions. ► SEProf provides fast run-time power estimation of a complex embedded system and facilitates designers to adjust dynamic power management strategies. ► SEProf supports energy profiling at different granularities and enables designers to make a tradeoff between profiling accuracy and overhead. ► The experimental results show that, by using SEProf, the average power estimation error is within 2%, and the performance overhead is less than 5%.