APRIS2023 Talk

Posted on November 1, 2023

Using Low Power Coprocessors in an FRP Language for Embedded Systems

Go Suzuki, Akihiko Yokoyama, Sosuke Moriguchi, Takuo Watanabe
Asia Pacific Conference on Robot IoT System Development and Platform (APRIS 2023), Tokyo, Nov. 1-2, 2023.

Abstract

A low power coprocessor in the microcontroller saves power consumption. While the main processor is in a sleep state, the low power coprocessor can process the inputs and maintain responsiveness. However, inter-processor communication and processor power state management make development more complicated. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a mechanism to switch a running processor to the functional reactive programming (FRP) language XStorm, which has an abstraction mechanism for modeling stateful behaviors. The proposed mechanism allows us to choose which processor to run in each state. Therefore, the switching of a running processor can be represented as a state transition. Our compiler can absorb differences in processor architectures and automatically generate programs for inter-processor communication and processor state management. As a result, developers can more easily describe system that coprocessors. We describe the proposed mechanism and report an evaluation on the power consumption and time of state transitions. (awarded the Best Paper Award)

Publication

Go Suzuki, Akihiko Yokoyama, Sosuke Moriguchi, Takuo Watanabe, Using Low Power Coprocessors in an FRP Language for Embedded Systems, Proceedings of 6th Asia Pacific Conference on Robot IoT System Development and Platform (APRIS 2023), pp. 1–8, IPSJ, Dec., 2023.