Energy Profiling of DSP Applications, A Case Study of an Intelligent ECG Monitor

By Dejan Raskovic & Emil Jovanov & Thomas Martin

Abstract:

Proper balance of power and performance for optimum
system organization requires precise profiling of the power
consumption of different hardware subsystems as well as
software functions. Moreover, power consumption of mobile
systems is even more important, since the battery is a large
portion of the overall size and weight of the system. Average
power consumption is only a crude estimate of power
requirements and battery life; a much better estimate can be
made using dynamic power consumption. Dynamic power
consumption is a function of the execution profile of the
given application running on specific hardware platform. In
this paper we introduce a new environment for energy
profiling of DSP applications. The environment consists of a
JTAG emulator, a high-resolution HP 3583A multimeter and
a workstation that controls devices and stores the traces. We
use Texas Instruments’ Real Time Data Exchange
mechanism (RTDXÔ) to generate an execution profile and
custom procedures for energy profile data acquisition using
GPIB interface. We developed custom procedures to
correlate and analyze both energy and execution profiles.
The environment allows us to improve the system power
consumption through changes in software organization and
to measure real battery life for the given hardware, software
and battery configuration. As a case study, we present the
analysis of a real-time portable ECG monitor implemented
using a Texas Instruments TMS320C5410-100 processor
board, and a Del Mar PWA ECG Amplifier.

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