Co-debug and Co-verification environment for power management system

Power management used to be a domain of mobile devices. Since energy bills and the environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants are in everybody´s mind, energy efficiency is a hot topic for each embedded system design. In the system design flow, trade off´s between hardware and software functionality have a major impact on power saving, i.e. data compression, cryptography, highly utilized functions, etc. As a result, power management is distributed between hardware and software implementation features and therefore has to be developed and validated as early as possible in a single environment, requiring co-debug and co-verification capabilities. Additionally, power architectures add complexity to system debug and verification since each power mode has to be validated in combination with all valid features. The presentation will introduce the complexity problem of a power management system distributed among hardware and software layers and will discuss the debug and verification challenges on different commonly used development platforms from virtual prototyping to the final embedded system.