Our Clock Power Model for MCUs accepted at EMSOFT'26
Our Paper on Modeling the Power Consumption of the Clock Tree on Embedded Devices is accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Michel Rottleuthner, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch,
A Power Model of System Clocks to Minimize Energy Consumption on Constrained MCUs,
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), IEEE : Piscataway, NJ, USA, September 2026. (in press)
[BibTeX][Abstract]
Abstract: Current microcontroller units (MCUs) incorporate complex clock systems that span a huge configuration space. The impact of individual low-level clock configurations for minimizing energy has not come into focus, yet. In this paper, we present a generic power model of system clocks and a method to semi-empirically parametrize it for a given platform. Following a fully automated measurement and optimization process, we derive results for three platforms of largely diverse clock architectures. Our empirical evaluation shows successful fits of the ground-truth power measurements for all platforms. With the lean platform models at hand, we are able to (i) predict the power consumption for all configurations of the clock tree, which allows for (ii) static energy optimization at development time and (iii) dynamic optimization of a Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) service during runtime. The model also allows (iv) to quantify the hidden energy consumption of internal clock nodes.
Note: Selected for presentation at ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2026)
Themes: Internet of Things