Current Monitoring Using the STX104 for Power Debugging

After having read The Unwritten Contract of Solid State Drives. (He, Jun. et al.) which went over how to best avoid penalties that system abstractions incur on solid state drives, we were incredibly interested in translating this work into the embedded domain to see how following the rules laid out in the paper effected performance on already power-optimized embedded hardware. Our interest was in optimizing I/O intensive software to minimize the amount of accesses to a uSD or eMMC memory device and reduce the overall energy consumption. Our target platform of interest was Digi's Connect Core 6UL Express board

To do this, we needed a reliable, low-noise and high-resolution device to be able to capture the input power of the connect core. Our STX104 provided a perfect, easy and low hassle solution to do exactly just that. In our experiment, we monitored input current using an STX104 hooked up to the V_sys rail of the Connect Core board. We ran multiple experiments wherein software running on the Connect Core sent a trigger pulse telling the STX104 to start collecting data. The simple configuration of the STX104 hardware and software allowed us to do rapid data acquisition after successive changes in target software parameters. All current data collected was processed in post to analyze the power graphs allowing us to see the effects of changing parameters on the fly. 

Check out the app note to see how you can use the STX104 for power debugging in your systems:

Current Monitoring Using STX104 for Software Power Debugging