POWER-House - POWER-aware, Hardware-supported Operating system and Ubiquitous application Software development Environment

Various embedded systems are constrained through their power consumption. Applications are ranging from battery powered device for consumer electronics (e.g. portable audio/video devices, feature phones) up to RF-powered smart card systems. Especially embedded systems software programmers (firmware, operating systems, and applications) are still missing effective tools for power estimation during the software development cycle. So called power-bugs are thus only detected when the already finished implementation is downloaded to the target device, which is usually late in the project, especially for concurrent hardware and software development. Furthermore, the strongly competitive market requires system-level development of embedded systems even when not all target devices are available in silicon. Rapid improvement in FPGA technology allows real-time functional emulation of single components within the embedded system.