Modern design of wireless devices requires the designers to have a special focus on power consumption to prolong the battery life of the final system. The designer therefore needs power consumption information very early in the process to be able to decide on system parameters, design methods, communication protocols, functionality restrictions. Typically, this is done by running simulations of the system to be developed and performing design space exploration. However, there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy of simulation, therefore the designer has to be aware of available tools and simulation methods he can choose from to achieve the best possible solution for his case.

Power-Aware System Design of Wireless Sensor Networks: Power Estimation and Power Profiling Strategies

A method of transmitting data is disclosed. At least one system block of a system-on-chip (SoC) is modeled at an untimed functional level in first and second untimed functional models. First and second transaction level (TL) models of the at least one system block system block are modeled at a transaction level (TL) using the first and second untimed functional models, respectively. First and second cycle accurate (CA) models are modeled at a cycle accurate (CA) level using the first and second TL models, respectively. Data is transmitted from the first untimed functional model to the first CA model, from the first CA model to the second CA model via a CA bus, and from the second CA model to the second untimed functional model.

Method and apparatus for electronic system model generation

Networks consisting of many autonomous sensors are gaining importance. Most wireless sensors have small batteries and must therefore be designed to consume very little power. In this paper, an approach for whole-system simulation for ultra-low power wireless sensor networks is proposed. To be able to estimate the power consumption of the whole network, the simulation framework must not only simulate the sensor nodes themselves, but also the overall system consisting of sensor nodes and other elements which can be much more sophisticated. It therefore includes an Instruction Set Simulator for better accuracy. To speed up the simulation Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) is used, with SystemC as the base for the simulation framework.

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SystemC-based power simulation of wireless sensor networks

In the ever growing area of wireless sensor networks it is very important to estimate the energy usage of sensor nodes, especially if they should be powered by a battery Often the accumulated energy consumption of a message delivery across the whole network is of interest too, in order to estimate battery life times, since message forwarding needs energy too For rapid development cycles, fast but accurate simulations are needed The approach presented in this paper uses transaction level modeling (TLM) to speedup simulation of wireless communication systems The fundamental idea is that air communication can be modeled similarly to a multi master bus Nodes are simulated by employing a multi-threaded instruction set simulator (ISS) and models of the peripheral components The energy usage for sensing, receiving and transmitting can be estimated in the simulation and this information can then be attached to TLM messages for accumulation related to messages The example use case throughout this paper is a tyre pressure monitoring system The modeling and simulation is done in SystemC1

Designing low-power wireless sensor networks

In today's real-time system design, a virtual prototype can help to increase both the design speed and quality. Developing a virtual prototyping platform requires realistic modeling of the HW system, accurate simulation of the real-time SW, and integration with a reactive real-time environment. Such a VP simulation platform is often difficult to develop. In this paper, we propose a case-study of autonomous two-wheeled robot to show how to develop a virtual prototyping platform rapidly in SystemC/TLM to adequately aid in the design of this instable system with hard real-time constraints. Our approach is an integration of four major model components. Firstly, an accurate physical model of the robot is provided. Secondly, a virtual world is modeled in Java that offers a 3D environment for the robot to move in. Thirdly, the embedded control SW is developed. Finally, the overall HW system is modeled in SystemC at transaction level. This HW model wraps the physical model, interacts with the virtual world, and simulates the real-time SW by integrating an Instruction Set Simulator of the embedded CPU. By integrating these components into a platform, designers can efficiently optimize the embedded SW architecture, explore the design space and check real-time conditions for different system parameters such as buffer sizes, CPU frequency or cache configurations.

A virtual prototyping platform for real-time systems with a case study for a two-wheeled robot

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Jeremy Bennett

Papers

Building a Loosely Timed SoC Model with OSCI TLM 2.0 A Case Study Using an Open Source ISS and Linux 2.6 Kernel