Exploring energy efficient state retention in transiently-powered computing systems

Abstract

Batteries have traditionally been used to power embedded electronic devices. However, requirements such as a long lifetime, low cost, and weight, pose significant challenges to battery-powered systems. Energy harvesting offers the potential for embedded systems to operate without batteries. Nonetheless, harvesting has been traditionally coupled with large energy buffers such as supercapacitors to tackle the instability of the source. Transiently-powered computing systems enable computation to be sustained despite the source
variability, without the need for additional energy storage. To make this feasible, the system state (e.g. registers and RAM) needs to be saved to Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) before a power outage, and restored once power is available again. Existing transient systems save the entire state of the system upon power failure and do not consider the properties of different NVM technologies, leading into a sub-optimal state retention process. As a consequence, the time and energy spent towards useful computation are decreased significantly, affecting the forward progress that the system can achieve. The aim of this research is to introduce novel methods to reduce the time and energy overhead of the state retention process, exploring solutions both in the software and hardware domain.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Geoff V. Merrett: orcid.org/0000-0003-4980-3894

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