Lauterbach Tool Profiles Power Usage in Embedded Systems

The Energy Profiler gives engineers the feedback that they need to fine tune their software for minimal power usage, said Barry Lock, UK Manager of Lauterbach. This might be in order to achieve maximum battery life or simply to reduce the device’s impact on the environment. Both of these issues are important market drivers at this time. This is what has been driving the development of this technology.

German based Lauterbach had a turnover in excess of $90 million worldwide during 2010 and has seen its customer base grow year on year. Recognised for both engineering excellence and exceptional technical support, Lauterbach tools have become a favourite with many hi-tech engineers. Lauterbach tools support more than 3500 microprocessors and all known ARM Cores, covering products from over 75 silicon companies. The quality and capability of these tools enables engineering teams to develop robust code whilst minimising development time lost to debugging.

The optimal reduction of energy consumption in a device can only happen when the software that controls the equipment consistently exploits all possible power-saving features of the hardware. Energy is the product of current, voltage and time, with each of these parameters influenced by the control software.

The Energy Profiler provides a test set-up that measures, records and analyzes the program and data flow of the control software as well as current and voltage gradients. Statistical analyses are run automatically after each program stop. They provide information about minimum, maximum and mean values of the energy consumption of the executed functions. Similarly, the absolute and percentage share of the total energy consumption is calculated for each function. This makes it easy to locate the program parts that use the most energy.

“For high volume products, the Energy Profiler can have a very positive impact on the commercial performance of a project,” said Barry Lock. “It can be used to reduce battery size or even enable the use of a less costly processor. At high volumes, this can result in significant savings on the bill-of-materials. Of course, simply having a longer battery life and low energy performance will help the device compete successfully in the marketplace.”

Lauterbach will be presenting and exhibiting at the NMI “Embedded Software in Automotive” event on 22nd Nov and also they will be exhibiting at Medelec, the new UK medical electronics conference and exhibition due to be held in Cambridge on 29 November 2011. www.medelec.co.uk