AGGIOS, Inc. will showcase its energy management solutions at ARM TechCon 2015 at its booth (Booth #835) and in a product demonstration with Xilinx. AGGIOS will conduct a product demonstration to highlight the strength of its innovative software solutions for power management. The demonstration will include an emergency radio use case with the AGGIOS Seed™ Energy Manager supervising a variety of low-power modes of the application processor core, real-time processor core, power management unit and the programmable logic of the Zynq® UltraScale+ MPSoC. The demonstration includes the Zynq MPSoC description using the Unified Hardware Abstraction and Layer UHAL® and application specific Seed Energy Manager adaptations with the AGGIOS EnergyLab™ tool.
The basic principle of energy design and management for integrated electronic systems is to optimize the electrical activity within the electronic circuitry without impacting user experience or intended purpose. During the (pre-silicon) energy design phase, also called power design in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), the focus is on tuning the hardware structures assuming certain nominal functional activities, voltages and clocks. In the subsequent (post-silicon) energy management phase, also called dynamic power management in operating systems, the voltages, clocks and functional activities are tuned during the test and run-time assuming certain hardware characteristics of the device.
Energy efficient complete solutions can be obtained only through optimal alignment across the pre- and post-silicon phases of energy optimization based on unified design flows, abstractions and formats. This requires a fundamental shift in the energy design and management methodology and requires a new software and tools infrastructure.
The Control Layer IO System (CLIOS) software is the run-time energy management software executed on the device and complements the standard OS power management. The main tasks of the CLIOS software are: Detect and respond to power management directives by the various OSes or during OS transitions; During OS suspend periods manages the sleep, suspend and dark wake states of the device; Coordinate power state changes of components, clusters and subsystems; Manage UHA operating points and scenes; Execute control code to retain state information during transitions; Change power states by directly accessing hardware components, including clock dividers, PLLs and PMICs; and Provide run-time power and energy estimates.
CLIOS accomplishes the above tasks and delivers: Fast and precise execution of power state changes; Small footprint to fit within local memory of dedicated cores; Flexibility to distribute energy management across all the participating cores and OSes; Support for wide range of processors ranging from application processors to dedicated power management and always-on-cores; The CLIOS run-time software is OS specific and currently supports the Linux operating system. Support for other operating systems, like Windows, can be delivered upon request.
