Peripheral state persistence for transiently-powered systems

Abstract

Recently has emerged the concept of transiently-powered systems: tiny battery-less embedded systems which harvest energy from their environment. To retain information despite frequent and unpredictable power failures, a transiently-powered system can use non-volatile memory to store checkpoints of program state. However current checkpointing techniques only consider the state of computation (processor, memory) and disregard peripheral state completely. This paper presents a software framework that allows for the use of non-trivial peripherals such as analog-to-digital converters, serial interfaces or radio devices, in transiently-powered systems.