Automated Software Power Optimization for Smart Card Systems with Focus on Peak Reduction

The complexity of embedded systems is continuously growing due to the increasing requirements on performance. In portable systems such as smart cards, not only performance is an important attribute, but also the power and energy consumed by a given application. Sources of energy used in smart card systems like batteries and electromagnetic fields are not such ideal elements, as their effectiveness depends heavily on the energy consumed over time. Optimization strategies proposed so far are implemented statically. Often a manual measurement of the current profile followed by manual optimizations is carried out. This procedure is very time consuming. We present a method for reducing automatically the power of an application based on a compiler optimization.