Plataforma de medição de consumo para comparação entre software e hardware em projetos energeticamente eficientes

Abstract

The large number of mobile devices increased the interest in low-power designs. Tools that allow the evaluation of alternative implementations give the designer actionable information to create energy-efficient designs. This paper presents a new power measurement platform able to compare the energy consumption of different algorithms implemented in software and in hardware. The proposed platform is able to measure the energy consumption of a specific process running in a general-purpose CPU with a standard operating system, and to compare the results with equivalent algorithms running in an FPGA. This allows the designer to choose the most energy-efficient software vs. hardware partitioning for a given application. Compared with the current state-of-the-art, the presented platform has four distinguishing features: (i) support for both software and hardware power measurements, (ii) measurement of individual code sections in the CPU, (iii) support for dynamic clock frequencies, and (iv) improvement of measurement precision. We also demonstrate how the developed platform has been used to analyze the energy consumption of network intrusion detection algorithms aimed at detecting probing attacks.