Power Oriented Hardware-Software Codesign for a Planetary Exploration Multisensor Instrument

The design of wireless sensor systems requires low power consumption to ensure high autonomy and long lifetimes, especially when they are used in remote locations. This article analyzes the power consumption of a data processing system for a multi-sensory instrument designed to study meteorological conditions on planetary surfaces. Three system architectures have been developed, two of which are based on software-hardware co-design. These architectures aim to optimize performance, resource usage, and processing speed. The energy consumption of these architectures has been measured and compared in this work. Furthermore, low power consumption techniques have been implemented in these architectures, such as reducing the clock frequency where possible. The effect of these techniques on power consumption has been analysed. The analysis results indicate that a pure hardware architecture is more efficient for handling low processing loads. Moreover, reducing the system clock frequency can lead to a $99 \%$ reduction in power consumption for hardware circuits and a $27 \%$ reduction for the microcontroller.