1 research outputs found
Cost-effective Energy Monitoring of a Zynq-based Real-time System including dual Gigabit Ethernet
The ongoing integration of fine-grained power management features already
established in CPU-driven Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) enables both traditional Field
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and, more recently, hybrid Programmable SoCs
(pSoCs) to reach more energy-sensitive application domains (such as, e.g.,
automotive and robotics). By combining a fixed-function multi-core SoC with
flexible, configurable FPGA fabric, the latter can be used to realize
heterogeneous Real-time Systems (RTSs) commonly implementing complex
application-specific architectures with high computation and communication
(I/O) densities. Their dynamic changes in workload, currently active power
saving features and thus power consumption require precise voltage and current
sensing on all relevant supply rails to enable dependable evaluation of the
various power management techniques. In this paper, we propose a low-cost
18-channel 16-bit-resolution measurement (sub-)system capable of 200 kSPS
(kilo-samples per second) for instrumentation of current pSoC development
boards. To this end, we join simultaneously sampling analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs) and analog voltage/current sensing circuitry with a Cortex M7
microcontroller using an SD card for storage. In addition, we propose to
include crucial I/O components such as Ethernet PHYs into the power monitoring
to gain a holistic view on the RTS's temporal behavior covering not only
computation on FPGA and CPUs, but also communication in terms of, e.g.,
reception of sensor values and transmission of actuation signals. We present an
FMC-sized implementation of our measurement system combined with two Gigabit
Ethernet PHYs and one HDMI input. Paired with Xilinx' ZC702 development board,
we are able to synchronously acquire power traces of a Zynq pSoC and the two
PHYs precise enough to identify individual Ethernet frames.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure