AURA SOM/AURA Hardware/Electrical Thermal and Mechanical Features/Operational characteristics

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History
Issue Date	Notes
2024-06-28	First public release

Operational characteristics[edit | edit source]

Maximum ratings[edit | edit source]

Parameter	Min	Typ	Max	Unit
Main power supply voltage	-0.3	3.3	3.6	V

Recommended ratings[edit | edit source]

Parameter	Min	Typ	Max	Unit
Main power supply voltage	3.135	3.3	3.465	V

Power consumption[edit | edit source]

Inevitably, system integrators face a number of challenges when designing a product that includes a SOM. These usually involve managing heat produced by the devices and sizing the carrier PSU.

To help them, AURA SoM power measurements are provided considering several use cases. Please note that AURA platform is so flexible that it is virtually impossible to test for all possible configurations and applications on the market. The use cases presented here should cover many realistic scenarios, however. Hence, they are supposed to be a useful and thorough reference. Of course, the actual customer's application may differ significantly with respect to the ones considered here. For this reason, application-specific requirements should always taken into account when designing such systems. Further measurements on a real system emulating the final product and/or simulations are recommended options as well.

Definitions[edit | edit source]

For convenience, some of the definitions established by NXP for SOC operating modes are reported below (for more details, please see also AN13917 chapter 4.2):

Run mode: in this mode, the Cortex-A55 CPU is active and running. Some portions can be shut off for power saving. It is possible with the NXP Low Drive system to scale frequency and voltage to balance between performance and consumption (see this page):
- Over drive (OD mode) with processor that works at 1.7 GHz and VDD_SOC at 0.9 V, DRAM works at 3733 MT/s
- Nominal drive (ND mode) with processor that works at 1.4 GHz and VDD_SOC at 0.85 V, DRAM works at 2800 MT/s
- Low drive with processor that works at 933 MHz and VDD_SOC at 0.8 V, DRAM works at 1866 MT/s
- Low drive with SWFFC (Software Fast Frequency Change) with processor that works at 933 MHz and VDD_SOC at 0.8 V, DRAM works at 625 MT/s
Low-power mode: this mode is defined as a Low-power run mode with all external power rails on. In this mode, all unnecessary power domains (MIX) can be off. The AONMIX and internal modules, such as OSC24M/PLL, are an exception in this mode. The Cortex CPU in AONMIX handles all the computing and data processing. Cortex-A55 is powered down and DRAM can be in self-refresh/retention mode.
- Idle mode: this mode is defined as one that a CPU can enter automatically when no threads are engaged, and no high-speed devices are in use. CPU can be put into a power-gated state, but with L3 data retained, DRAM, and bus clocks are reduced. Most of the internal logic is clock-gated; yet is still powered. In this mode, all the external power from PMIC remains the same, and most IPs remain in their state. Therefore, the interrupt response in this mode is quick compared to the Run mode.
- Suspend mode: this mode is defined as the most power-saving mode since it shuts off all the clocks and all the unnecessary power supplies. In this mode, the Cortex-A55 CPU is fully power gated, all internal digital logic, and the analog circuits that can be powered down are off, and all PHYs are power gated. VDD_SOC (and related digital supply) voltage is reduced to the "Suspend mode" voltage. Compared to Idle, this mode takes a longer time to exit, but it also uses far less energy.
- BBSM mode: this mode is also called RTC mode. In this mode, to keep RTC and BBSM logic alive, only the power for the BBSM domain remains on.
Off mode: in this mode, all power rails are off.

Testbench[edit | edit source]

Measurements were performed on a testbed composed as follows:

INA226-based datalogger for power measurement
AURA Evaluation Kit
AURA Evaluation Kit with adapter only for stress user cases
Linux BSP: DESK-MX9-L 5.1.0

W.r.t. the SoM, the model used was DAUC221000I0R SOM model:

i.MX9352 1.7GHz (p.n. MIMX9352CVVXMAB)
2 GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
8 GB eMMC

For more information about software tools utilized for this testing, please refer to this page.

Power was measured on the SoM power rail 3.3VIN. The power was measured at 200 Sa/s for 3 minutes starting after the completion of the boot phase: the average, minimum, and maximum values found in each mode are shown in the following table while the corresponding time graphs are shown in the next paragraph.

Four major use cases have been considered:

Run mode Cortex-A55 (light workload): after booting the Yocto Linux distribution, no additional user-space applications were executed other than the ones starting automatically such as systemd daemons; please note, that all four drive modes were tested.
Run mode Cortex-A55 (heavy workload): in this configuration, to induce high consumption on A55 cores, the following energy-intensive operations were performed:
- both Ethernet interfaces were configured to operate at 1 Gbps and two instances of endless iperf3 processes were run (one for each interface) exchanging data with an external server
- camera streaming a video to the HDMI display
- execute the sat app for stressing the SOC and the SDRAM memory
Run mode Cortex-M33: the A55 cores were put into suspension, while M33 core run a test application
Low-power modes: all cores are turned off; the three modes also turn off portions of the SoM and theSoC.

Linux user-space and bare metal applications[edit | edit source]

SAT (Stressful Application Test) for stressing the SoC and the RAM memory, https://github.com/stressapptest/stressapptest
iperf3 for stressing both ethernet interfaces, execute an endless with external server support, https://iperf.fr/
gstreamer for streaming camera to HDMI display, https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
CoreMark is provided by NXP as a prebuilt binary image for testing the M33 core: NXP AN13917 chapter 6.9, use case binaries.

Results[edit | edit source]


ID	Mode group	Mode	Cortex A55	Cortex M33	SDRAM [MT/s]	VDD_SOC [V]	Power [W]			Notes
ID	Mode group	Mode	Cortex A55	Cortex M33	SDRAM [MT/s]	VDD_SOC [V]	min	avg	max	Notes
1	Run mode (light workload)	Over drive	1.7 GHz No specific user space applications were run	reset	3733	0.90	1.601	1.696	2.211
2		Nominal	1.4 GHz No specific user space applications were run	reset	2800	0.85	1.543	1.584	1.838
3		Low drive	933 MHz No specific user space applications were run	reset	1866	0.8	1.468	1.508	1.723
4		Low drive with SWFFC (Software Fast Frequency Change)	933 MHz No specific user space applications were run	reset	625	0.8	1.415	1.462	1.610
5	Run mode (heavy workload)	Over drive	1.7 GHz Additional user space applications: SAT 2x iperf3 gstreamer pipeline (camera acquisition/visualization)	reset	3733	0.90	2.030	2.443	2.779	EVK with adapter is required to use the additional peripherals
6		Nominal	1.4 GHz Additional user space applications: SAT 2x iperf3 gstreamer pipeline (camera acquisition/visualization)	reset	2800	0.85	1.808	2.023	2.209
7		Low drive	933 MHz Additional user space applications: SAT 2x iperf3 gstreamer pipeline (camera acquisition/visualization)	reset	1866	0.8	1.625	1.834	2.001
8		Low drive with SWFFC (Software Fast Frequency Change)	933 MHz Additional user space applications: SAT 2x iperf3 gstreamer pipeline (camera acquisition/visualization)	reset	625	0.8	1.553	1.662	1.794
9	Run mode	Over drive	suspend	250 MHz User space applications: WFI	NA	0.65	0.2739	0.2751	0.2777	PHY ETH reset DDR in Self-refresh mode WFI stands for wait for interrupt; for more details, please see this page
10	Run mode	Over drive	suspend	250 MHz User space applications: CoreMark	NA	0.65	0.2762	0.2780	0.2800	PHY ETH reset DDR in Self-refresh mode
11	Low-power modes	Idle	suspend	reset	NA	0.65	0.5997	0.6043	0.6104	DDR in Self-refresh mode
12		Suspend	suspend	reset	NA	0.65	0.1610	0.1636	0.1663	DDR in Self-refresh mode
13		BBSM (Battery-Backed Secure Memory)	OFF	OFF	NA	0	820 x10^-6	971 x10^-6	1130 x10^-6	PMIC turns off all power except NVCC_BBSM_1V8 only a portion of the SoC and PMIC is powered

Power charts[edit | edit source]

The number between round brackets indicates the ID of the use case listed in the table above.

Run mode (light workload)[edit | edit source]


(1) Run A55, light workload, OverDrive	(2) Run A55, light workload, NominalDrive	(3) Run A55, light workload, LowDrive	(4) Run A55, light workload, LowDriveSWFFC

Run mode (heavy workload)[edit | edit source]


(5) Run A55, heavy workload, OverDrive	(6) Run A55, heavy workload, NominalDrive	(7) Run A55, heavy workload, LowDrive	(8) Run A55, heavy workload, LowDriveSWFFC