Software Memory Power
Bachelor’s Thesis / Master’s Thesis / Student Research Project
The energy demand of embedded systems is crucial and typically dominated by the memory subsystem. Off-the-shelf MCU platforms usually offer a wide range of memory configurations in terms of overall memory size, which may differ in the number of memory banks provided. Split memory banks have the potential to optimize energy demand, but this often remains unused in available hardware due to a lack of power management support or require significant manual effort to leverage the benefits of split-banked memory architectures.
Application-specific power management offers great potential for low-energy computing in embedded devices, in controlling the power modes of specifically enhanced architectural components by the use of many different techniques (i.e., adjusting clock frequencies, clock gating, power gating, body biasing, …) on different domains of the system (i.e., processor core, periphery, memory subsystem, …). Typically, the software running on these devices can make use of the power-management techniques by triggering Power Modes (PMs) provided by a Power Management Controller (PMC).
Since modern sensor applications frequently rely on memory-intensive data-processing algorithms, the impact of the memory subsystem is becoming a dominant factor on the overall energy demand of the system and should therefore be the focus of optimization efforts.
References
Requirements (varying depending on topic)
- Python
- Linux and Git
- SystemVerilog
- Understanding of computer architectures
- Successfully atteded the lecture “Grundlagen der Rechnerarchitektur” (recommended)
- Successfully atteded the lecture “Digital Design and Synthesis of Embedded Systems” (recommended)