In this work, we proposed the power-neutral operating paradigm which negates the need for energy storage to be added to the system. It does this by dynamically modulating a device's performance such that the instantaneous power consumption matches the instantaneous power harvested. In our research, we have demonstrated power-neutral behaviour on both an ultralow power single-core MCU (where power consumption is controlled through dynamic frequency scaling (DFS)), and a heterogeneous multi-core SoC running Linux (where power consumption is controlled through both dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and core hotplugging).
Watch the video below to watch Dr Merrett presenting our power-neutral computing research at the Arm Research Summit 2017.
Associated Downloads
You can find the power-neutral code for the Texas Instruments MSP430FR5739 microcontroller below. If you use this in your research, please acknowledge this by citing this paper.
You can find the power-neutral code for the Arm/Samsung 8-core big.Little processor (on the ODROID XU-3/4 platform) below. If you use this in your research, please acknowledge this by citing this paper.
Associated Publications
Journal Articles
- D. Balsamo, B.J. Fletcher, A.S. Weddell, G. Karatziolas, B.M. Al-Hashimi, G.V. Merrett (2018) Momentum: Power Neutral Performance Scaling with Intrinsic MPPT for Energy Harvesting Computing Systems. ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems.
- D. Balsamo, A. Das, A.S. Weddell, D. Brunelli, B.M. Al-Hashimi, G.V. Merrett and L. Benini (2016) Graceful Performance Modulation for Power-Neutral Transient Computing Systems IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Conference Papers, Posters and Presentations
- D. Balsamo, B.J. Fletcher, G.V. Merrett (2018) Power-neutral performance scaling for self-powered multicore computing systems At Adaptive Many-Core Architectures and Systems Workshop, York, United Kingdom. 13 - 15 June 2018.
- G.V. Merrett (2017) Power-neutral computing for IoT devices At ARM Research Summit 2017, Cambridge, United Kingdom. 11 - 13 Sep 2017.
- B. Fletcher, D. Balsamo and G.V. Merrett (2017) Power neutral performance scaling for energy harvesting MP-SoCs In 2017 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE). IEEE.. (doi:10.23919/DATE.2017.7927231).