Introduction to energy storage debugging

What is energy debugging?

Energy debugging is now a circular development cycle where developers can use Energy Micro’s hardware and software tools together with EFM32 MCUs to achieve the lowest energy consumption in their applications (Figure 2). The developer can iteratively debug the code towards energy friendliness with instant feedback on the applied changes.

How important is time factor for energy debugging?

Energy consumption is simply the area below the current trace, so the smaller the area the smaller the energy drain. This is achieved by reducing the current consumption and the time the MCU takes to execute tasks. It is therefore easy to realize how important the time factor is for energy debugging.

What is Energy Micro's advanced energy debugging tool?

These energy pitfalls can now be avoided with Energy Micro’s patent pending toolset for advanced energy debugging. The simple and affordable solution presented by Energy Micro enables developers to identify and remove energy bugs with a high degree of accuracy.

What is energy friendly embedded systems development?

Real-time information on current consumption is correlated with program counter sampling to provide advanced energy monitoring capabilities. Energy friendly embedded systems development can be seen as a three stage cycle: hardware debugging, software functionality debugging and software energy debugging.

How can software reduce energy consumption?

Software is not usually seen as an energy drain but every clock cycle consumes energy and minimizing this becomes a key challenge in order to reduce overall system consumption. Developers are now able to visualize the energy consumption of their systems and relate it to the software running on the microcontroller.

Why do developers need a more energy efficient battery?

In cases where developers are satisfied with their system’s battery life, increasing the energy efficiency means they can switch to a smaller and cheaper battery which will lower the overall cost. There are also situations where the operating life must be extended to the absolute maximum.