System level power profile analysis and optimization for smart cards and mobile devices

Abstract

The steadily increasing performance of RF-powered devices implies also a rise in power consumption. To counteract this trend, it is mandatory to accomplish power optimizations at every stage in the HW/SW co-design process. Since the momentarily available energy depends on the power profile of anterior tasks, the behavior of the RF-interface has to be considered in the optimization process to achieve a maximum of efficiency by maintaining the system stability.This paper introduces an accurate discrete-time model of the energy source of RF-powered devices. Based on this model, a power profile analysis tool has been developed, which identifies automatically critical regions for the energy source in the current profile of the system. The use of this framework is illustrated in a software optimization process, which intends to eliminate the detected critical areas.

Supply voltage emulation platform for DVFS voltage drop compensation explorations

“…Equ. 2 gives the modeled supply voltagev(t) derived from the equivalent circuit and implemented in the SVE architecture [6].…”

Using field strength scaling to save energy in mobile HF-band RFID-systems

“…Another fact to consider is that the transponder is only passively powered by the reader [7]. This means that the transponder cannot respond, if the provided power drops under a certain threshold.…”