Quasi-Static Voltage Scaling for Energy Minimization with Time Constraints

Alexandru Andrei (1) , Marcus T. Schmitz (2) , Petru Eles (1) , Zebo Peng (1) , Bashir M. Al Hashimi (2)

1 Department of Computer and Information Science - Linköping University
2 Dept. of Computer and Information Science

Supply voltage scaling and adaptive body-biasing are important techniques that help to reduce the energy dissipation of embedded systems. This is achieved by dynamically adjusting the voltage and performance settings according to the application needs. In order to take full advantage of slack that arises from variations in the execution time, it is important to recalculate the voltage (performance) settings during run-time, i.e., online. However, voltage scaling (VS) is computationally expensive, and thus significantly hampers the possible energy savings. To overcome the online complexity, we propose a quasi-static voltage scaling scheme, with a constant online time complexity O(1). This allows to increase the exploitable slack as well as to avoid the energy dissipated due to online recalculation of the voltage settings. We conduct several experiments that demonstrate the advantages of the proposed technique over the previously published voltage scaling approaches.

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]; Electronique

Alexandru Andrei, Marcus T. Schmitz, Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, Bashir M. Al Hashimi. Quasi-Static Voltage Scaling for Energy Minimization with Time Constraints. DATE'05, Mar 2005, Munich, Germany. pp.514-519. ⟨hal-00181654⟩