Automation of Dynamic Power Management in FPGA-Based Energy-Constrained Systems

The era of the Internet of Things comes with a huge number of interconnected communicating devices, which are often rather limited on the energy supply (e.g. battery powered or energy harvesting). Therefore, the pressure on energy efficiency of their operation (influencing lifetime or amount of functions) is especially crucial. In spite of a growing number of IoT devices, there still are many applications that are very specific and their market is quite limited. This is where the FPGAs offer a good alternative to dedicated application-specific chips, which would be too costly for such a purpose. Therefore, we target the power-management automation that simplifies energy-efficient design for FPGA platforms. A designer is then able to specify just an abstract power management in the commonly used SystemC model and it is automatically transformed in the more-complex form acceptable by a specific FPGA device. The proposed simplification and automation shortens the time-to-market of energy-efficient IoT products and prevents possible human-errors that could be otherwise introduced to the design. The alleviated verification and debugging spare even more time in the development process. The experiments have proved the benefits of the proposed automation method.