EEMBC and VOLKSWAGEN to Develop Benchmarking Standards to Quantify Microcontroller Energy Efficiency

With increasing fuel costs, there is a growing emphasis on reducing energy consumption and improving fuel economy in automobiles. Simultaneously, there is also an on-going requirement to ensure the highest levels of robustness in any automotive product. Microcontroller efficiency (optimizing both performance and energy) is a critical parameter with far-reaching consequences, especially with the rising number of microcontrollers in the car. The working group project, to augment results originally produced in 2011, is being chaired by Volkswagen and currently joined by eleven top-tier semiconductor vendors including Freescale, Fujitsu, Infineon, Microchip, NXP, Renesas, STMicroelectronics, and TI. Already, the effort has yielded a full working specification for measuring performance and energy efficiency of automotive microcontrollers under various low-power operating conditions. EEMBC has also developed a prototype of this benchmark implemented on several key semiconductor evaluation boards.

We’re pleased that Volkswagen is continuing its important leadership role with the consortium and look forward to the insight they and the working group will provide to help EEMBC define and create our next-generation automotive benchmark suite,” said EEMBC President Markus Levy. “Volkswagen has been a long-time leader in the automotive industry and as chair of this project, they will continue to provide inputs to ensure the real-world value of this benchmark and subsequent versions that will address increasing microcontroller complexity and robustness requirements. We also expect that Volkswagen’s participation will produce a roadmap for automotive and other end-market manufacturers to get involved with EEMBC to guarantee equitable and valuable benchmarks for their industry.”

“As a world leader in advanced automotive systems, Volkswagen is continuing to chair the EEMBC Automotive working group and lend its expertise to ensure that the new benchmark reflects real-world system-design conditions and leads to improved efficiency,” said Volkswagen’s head of electric and electronic development, Dr. Volkmar Tanneberger. “Following completion of this new benchmark suite, we will demand the Tier 1 suppliers and semiconductor vendors to provide results for the microcontrollers that will be integrated into the next generation of electronic modules.”

EEMBC’s first-generation automotive benchmark suite, AutoBench, was designed to focus on the CPU’s processing power, measuring the time required to complete specific algorithms. The new benchmark suite adds new tests to measure CPU performance while simultaneously monitoring peripherals and energy usage. Individual tests of the microcontroller measure the power consumption of the CPU and peripherals under various loads, the amount of time that it spends in low-power modes under various CPU/peripheral loads, and the time required to wake the MCU from its various low-power states to resume processing. Moreover, the working group will align this benchmark suite with the AUTOSAR development partnership, utilizing the Microcontroller Abstraction Layer (MCAL) to interface to the underlying microcontroller hardware.

This benchmark specification will be open to all world-wide car manufacturers and tier 1 suppliers, and EEMBC encourages everyone in the ecosystem to join the effort to develop subsequent phases of this benchmark.