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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Power Profiler for Accelerated Emedded Hardware Development
T2 - Streamlining the Development Process with Efficient Power Analysis
AU - Oppenheim, Matthew
PY - 2025/6/24
Y1 - 2025/6/24
N2 - A power profiler is an instrument that accurately measures the power that your device under test (DUT) uses real-time. This allows us to see how the changes to the hardware and firmware on our latest embedded project affect the power that our device uses. In this article I explain how I used the Nordic Semiconductor Power Profiler Kit 2 (PPK2)[1] to significantly improve the battery life of a wearable assistive technology project. The profiler also played a major role in debugging when the hardware was misbehaving. A power profiler gives an extra channel of information as to what the hardware is doing in addition to our usual debugging tools. By monitoring how the current varies in a microcontroller, security experts such as Colin O’Flynn can even extract enough information as to what the internals of the microprocessor are doing to crack the encryption of supposedly secure data[, described in his article "Side-Channel Power Analysis" (Circuit Cellar 344, March, 2019) [2].
AB - A power profiler is an instrument that accurately measures the power that your device under test (DUT) uses real-time. This allows us to see how the changes to the hardware and firmware on our latest embedded project affect the power that our device uses. In this article I explain how I used the Nordic Semiconductor Power Profiler Kit 2 (PPK2)[1] to significantly improve the battery life of a wearable assistive technology project. The profiler also played a major role in debugging when the hardware was misbehaving. A power profiler gives an extra channel of information as to what the hardware is doing in addition to our usual debugging tools. By monitoring how the current varies in a microcontroller, security experts such as Colin O’Flynn can even extract enough information as to what the internals of the microprocessor are doing to crack the encryption of supposedly secure data[, described in his article "Side-Channel Power Analysis" (Circuit Cellar 344, March, 2019) [2].
KW - embedded, power profiler
M3 - Journal article
VL - 1
SP - 26
JO - Circuit Cellar - The Magazine For Computer Applications
JF - Circuit Cellar - The Magazine For Computer Applications
SN - 1528-0608
IS - 420
ER -