TECAP

TECAP - Tools for Energy Consumption Aware Processing

Purpose of the TECAP-project is to develop tools, which help to write energy efficient software for simple microcontrollers or microprocessors. In previous studies in different laboratories it has been shown that different instructions in the microcontroller or a in a microprocessor consume a different amount of energy. According to this fact it should be possible reduce the energy consumption of a microcontroller through software optimization.

In order to do energy aware software optimization, the energy consumption of every instruction in the microcontrollers instruction set must be known. This instruction level energy consumption can be obtained in two ways. One way is to use a model of the microcontroller and simulate the energy consumption. Another way is to measure the energy consumption with a real microcontroller. Because the models of a commercial microcontrollers are not widely available, the TECAP-project concentrates on measuring real controllers.

TECAP is a cooperation project between two different laboratories in Tampere University of Technology. Department of Electronics is responsible for instruction level energy consumption measurements and the Department of Software Systems is responsible for writing the computer tools, which exploits the measurement results.

TECAP is funded by Academy of Finland. Project was started in begin of year 2004 and it will end in the end of year 2005.

Updated , Hokkanen Mirja