09:00

Challanges- Low Power and time to market – A case study.

Low power consumption is becoming increasingly important in all market segments.  Designers are faced with the challenge to minimize power consumption, while at the same time increase performance, keep cost down and meet tough time-to-market demands.

Marvell, who is a world leading ARM supplier, has several low power reference platforms which helps designers meet these requirements.

An example of a customer who has benefitted from this is the Swedish company Excito, who used Marvell based reference designs for their new low power home media servers.  In less than 6 months they managed to redesign and release a new product, with very low power consumption and significantly higher performance.

The purpose of this seminar is to illustrate how Marvell’s reference platforms can help designers meet tight power budgets, while still enhancing performance and keeping the design time to a minimum.

Presenter: Richard Herbert, Marvell

Richard joined Marvell at the end of 2000 and has worked with almost all Marvell technologies since then. With over 20 years of industry experience Richard now acts as one of the leading technical evangelists in Marvell Europe where his work includes Applications Engineering, System Engineering, Product Introduction and Technical Marketing. With an emphasis on targeting major customers, applications and markets for Marvell he has had contact with Marvell's ARM based SOC's from the first product introductions. Richard has helped guide a strategy that now sees Marvell engaging with customers across multiple telecommunications, consumer and embedded markets. Recently he has been working on the introduction of Marvell's high performance, highly integrated, low power ARM SOC architectures, recognizing the industries desire to achieve high performance in packages with a minimal power footprint.

09:30

Forget about low power; let us talk about system efficiency

It is not a new topic, but today it is getting a key differentiator, advertiser, and selling argument for (green) different solutions.
Kinetis The presentation address exact this market needs. It supports We discuss
- advanced platform concepts,
- system cost reduction due to integration,
- and highest performance as well as common low power strategies
  combined with smart cooperating and autarchic performing features
to achieve highest efficiency.
Participants will be equipped to design for multiple markets and platforms a cost optimized and power efficient solution, by using our NEW Kinetis family. This presentation will provide you an overview about Kinetis capabilities, illustrates for different applications.

Presenter Jakob Riis, Freescale

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10:00

Break

10:30

Ultra Low Power Radio for Pervasive Computing

The pervasive computing vision, in which embedded systems form an Internet of things, is only achievable if communication by extremely low power radio is enabled. The low power operation of these communicating embedded devices is of utmost importance since the lifetime is often required to be in the range of ten years. Several new low power radio architectures, protocols, and operation methods have been proposed over recent years. The large variation of requirements in the form of communication capacity, response time and system capacity for different types of applications often require optimized application specific designs. Ultra low power operation can often only be achieved if a very careful co-design of radio architecture, its operation, and communication protocols is conducted. The design space is very complex but there exist some basic cornerstones which are good to take into account at an early system design phase.
An example of an important cornerstone is the type of activation that the specific application requires, time triggered or event triggered activation. The type of activation that the application requires has a direct impact on which type of medium access control that should be applied. Two main classes of medium access protocols that are available are contention based and contention free channel access. Contention based channel access methods often use some form of Aloha, CSMA or CSMA with collision avoidance. From a theoretical perspective a contention free channel access mechanism is preferable, since it does not introduce any arbitration overhead. Three straightforward methods are available for contention free channel access: polling, strobing and cyclic broadcast.
Another important issue is the choice of technology platform. A very high degree of integration is required, low cost materials must be used for large scale deployment. These requirements are often contradictory and put high demands on the designer of the system. Semiconductor technology integration is mainly driven by the demands from the digital domain. Analogue and high frequency designers have to adapt to the given prerequisites from developed processes. High frequency electric properties for low cost materials are often poor and with large variations, or even largely unknown. The cost for this is an increase in power and complexity of the designs.
In this presentation a clarification of these and other aspects of the system design of low power radio will be given together with a discussion of how they interact with each other.

Presenter Emil Nilsson, Halmstad University

Emil belong to the research group for hardware design for cooperating embedded systems within the Centre for Research on Embedded Systems (CERES) at Halmstad University and are involved in the start and buildup of companies such as Free2move, LeptonRadio and TamperSeal,  the Embedded Award winner of 2010. Emil Nilsson is a senior research engineer in RF electronics and microwave technology at CERES.

11:00

Power Debugging-How it can Benefit you

In this session, we learn how power debugging is able to tie the power consumption to the source code of the application. We will also look at how to interpret the information that is presented to you by IAR Embedded Workbench so that you can tell if your ideas help trim the power budget of your device. IAR Systems unique power debugging feature helps you ensure that you do indeed have the power to make your battery last as long as possible.

Presenter: Thomas Sporrong; IAR Systems

Thomas Sporrong (B.S.EE, M.Sc at Mälardalen University) is a Field Application Engineer with IAR Systems and has been with the company for over 8 years. During this time Thomas has helped many customers achieving their embedded design goals, developed training courses, and also written numerous white papers on how to get the most out of today’s integrated tool suits for embedded systems development..