Low-Power System Design
Course Description
Contents
Designing systems with a low energy footprint is an increasingly important topic. There are many applications for low-power systems ranging from mobile devices powered from batteries such as today's smart phones to energy efficient household appliances and datacenters. Key drivers are to be found mainly in the tremendous increase of mobile devices and the growing integration density requiring to carefully reason about power, both from a provision and consumption viewpoint. Traditional circuit design classes introduce low-power solely from a hardware perspective with a focus on the power performance of a single or at most a hand full of circuit elements. Similarly, low-power aspects are touched in a multitude of other classes, mostly as a side topic. However in successfully designing systems with a low energy footprint it is not sufficient to only look at low-power as an aspect of second class. In modern low-power system design advanced CMOS circuits are of course a key ingredient but successful low-power integration involves many more disciplines such as system architecture, different sources of energy as well as storage and most importantly software and algorithms.
In this lecture we will discuss aspects of low-power design as a first class citizen introducing key concepts as well as modeling and measurement techniques focusing mainly on the design of networked embedded systems but of course equally applicable to many other classes of systems. The lecture is further accompanied by a reading seminar as well as a hands-on design project on sensor nodes.
Organization
Class time is split in two halves. In the first half engineering fundamentals are introduced. In the second half of the class we will cover 1-2 research papers (see Reading Seminar for details). Students are expected to have read the papers before class and participate in discussion. 1-2 students will be assigned to help lead off the discussion.
The discussion is not solely factual presentation of the paper but also interpretation, the context of the broader research literature and opinion on the work being discussed.
Reading and Writing Seminar
The reading and writing seminar is integral part of this course. Here we will jointly discuss relevant research papers. Every student is expected to contribute with minimum 1x summary write-up and paper presentation and 4x additional review commenting. Since we have more students participating than we have papers/weeks in the semester we will work in small student groups of 2-3 students max. A signup sheet is circulated in class.
Reading Seminar Signupsheet [pdf]
We use Matrix for organizing the preparation of the seminar.
The PDFs of the papers to be discussed are available here:
The assigned students have to post their summaries in the corresponding channel until Friday preceeding the discussion. The reviewers and other interested students comment directly in the channel once the initial review/summary has been uploaded. This will allow everyone to easily access and participate in the online discussions prior to discussing each paper, the summaries and discussion comments in class.
Labs & Design Project
In groups of two students, your task will be to design, implement, and validate a low-power application for a network of DPP wireless sensor nodes.
The Design Project requires a laptop with a working install of STM32CubeIDE. The software is available for Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems on the following website:
external pagehttps://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.htmlcall_made
Please install the IDE for your platform before the first Lab.
Material
DownloadLab Materialvertical_align_bottom (password protected)
DownloadDesign Project Materialvertical_align_bottom (password protected)
Resources
Electronic Materials
All materials for the class are available in a public repository and are regularly updated during the semester: