Lynsyn Lite has been designed to provide accurate measurement of a system’s energy consumption based on application behaviour, saving on the time-consuming process of tracking down the root causes of power issues compared to using traditional laboratory-grade power measurement equipment.
The core technology was developed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) as part of its involvement in the EU’s recently completed TULIPP project, to overcome the challenges of accurately measuring energy consumption in the development of the project’s high performance, energy-efficient reference platform targeting the growing range of increasingly complex image processing applications.
Developed with technology transfer funding from TETRAMAX, the Horizon 2020 innovation hub, Lynsyn Lite has been engineered by NTNU in conjunction with Sundance Multiprocessor Technology to provide a low-cost, commercial implementation of the core Lynsyn technology.
Lynsyn Lite measures the power usage of individual sections of source code deployed in embedded and CLEC systems. It connects over JTAG to non-intrusively sample the program counters of the system processors and correlate the power measurements with the source code, mapping consumption samples to application actions. A sampling frequency of up to 10kHz is used.
It features three sensors that measure both current and voltage and, although it has been designed to support application power profiling primarily of systems based on ARM Cortex A9, A53 and A57 cores, there is no need to purchase a separate JTAG pod as it is a replacement for the Xilinx Platform Cable USB-II and can, therefore, also be used as a generic JTAG programming device with the Xilinx Vivado tool suite and a remotely controlled current/voltage meter over USB. Lynsyn Lite is compatible with both Linux and Windows operating systems and includes open source software that both samples and visualizes measurement results.
“High-performance embedded and customised low-energy computing systems require a high degree of energy efficiency, the development of which demands accurate measurement of energy consumption based on application behaviour,” said Flemming Christensen, Managing Director of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology. “Lynsyn Lite quickly, easily and accurately overcomes the challenges involved at a fraction of the cost of previous solutions. Designed to perform application power profiling primarily of systems based on ARM Cortex A cores, it can also be used as a generic power profiling tool.”
