April 17, 2012 -- The importance of power management and optimization in today's embedded designs has been steadily growing as an increasing number of battery-powered devices continue to perform more complex tasks. The unrelenting demand for connectivity and new features presents a growing challenge to designers. Yet, very often power optimizations are left to the very end of the project cycle, almost as an afterthought. When setting out to design a power-optimized embedded device, it is important to consider power management from the very inception of the project.

This article discusses design considerations that should be made when beginning a new embedded design. The considerations include choosing the hardware with appropriate capabilities, defining hardware-design constraints to allow software to manage power, making the right choice of an operating system and drivers, defining appropriate power-usage profiles, choosing measurable power goals, and providing these goals to the software development team to track throughout the development process.

By Adam Kaiser. (Kaiser is a Nucleus RTOS architect for the Mentor Embedded team at Mentor Graphics Corp.)