ESC Boston

This week I am making a flying visit to DESIGN East [a.k.a. ESC Boston] to present a couple of classes. When I say “flying”, I am not alluding to my mode of transportation, but the duration of my visit. My first paper is Wednesday afternoon and my second is lunchtime on Thursday; I fly in Wednesday morning and out again Thursday evening. I even manage to pack in some other activity while I am there, but I do not think I will be suffering jet lag when I get home! Even though it is a short visit, I look forward to be in Boston again – it has been a while.

My two papers address RTOS oriented topics: one is about designing for low power; the other looks at measuring RTOS performance …

Here are the details of my 2 sessions:

How to Measure RTOS Performance

In the world of smart phones and tablet PCs memory might be cheap, but in the more constrained universe of deeply embedded devices, it is still a precious resource. This is one of the many reasons why most 16- and 32-bit embedded designs rely on the services of a scalable real-time operating system (RTOS). An RTOS allows product designers to focus on the added value of their solution while delegating efficient resource (memory, peripheral, etc.) management. In addition to footprint advantages, an RTOS operates with a degree of determinism that is an essential requirement for a variety of embedded applications. This paper takes a look at “typical” reported performance metrics for an RTOS in the embedded industry.

Power Management in Embedded Systems

The importance of power management in today’s embedded designs has been steadily growing as an increasing number of battery powered devices are developed. Often power optimizations are left to the very end of the project cycle, almost as an afterthought. In this presentation we will discuss design considerations that should be made when starting a new power sensitive embedded design, which include choosing the hardware with desired capabilities, defining a hardware architecture that will allow software to dynamically control power consumption, defining appropriate power usage profiles, making the appropriate choice of an operating system and drivers, choosing measurable power goals and providing these goals to the software development team to track throughout the development process.

If you are at ESC and can do so, please drop by and say hi. If you would like a copy of my slides, please comment or email.