EBL 2024

To develop energy-efficient systems, it is necessary to monitor their energy consumption during the development phase. This requires measurements in addition to datasheet-based evaluations since the complex interactions between different components increase the overall energy demand. Measuring the actual energy consumption of the system and its components are therefore essential. Changes to the firmware during the development process can lead to unintended increase of energy consumption, e.g. by preventing access to a low power state. Therefore, a single measurement of the energy consumption is not sufficient. In order to systematically verify such effects, so-called continuous integration tests (CI tests) exists on the software side, which repeatedly ensure the functionality of the firmware. However, such a method of integration for energy consumption does not exist to date. This article presents a testbed that that facilitates the evaluation of energy consumption of real hardware as part of CI tests. To achieve this, a testbed is developed that allows the remote programming of several devices-under-test (DUTs) simultaneously via CI, to measure the energy consumption subsequently and return the results to the CI. In addition, the use of DUTs with different configurations is made possible in order to be able to test different systems simultaneously.