Power-composition profile driven co-synthesis with power management selection for dynamic and leakage energy reduction

Abstract

Recent research has shown that the combination of dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and adaptive body biasing (ABB) yields high energy reductions in embedded systems. Nevertheless, the implementation of DVS and ABB requires a significant system cost, making it less attractive for many small systems. In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to reduce this system cost and to achieve comparable energy saving to that obtained using combined DVS and ABB scheme through a co-synthesis methodology which is aware of the tasks' power-composition profile (the ratio of the dynamic power to the leakage power). In particular, the presented methodology performs a power management selection at the architectural level, i. e., it decides upon which processing elements to be equipped with which power management scheme (DVS, ABB, or combined DVS and ABB) - with the aim to achieve high energy savings at a reduced implementation cost. The proposed technique maps, schedules, and voltage scales applications specified as task graphs with timing constraints. Detailed experiments including a real-life benchmark are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.