Intelligent energy managementTM for portable embedded systems

Summary form only given. One of today´s most successful embedded devices, the mobile phone, embodies a set of challenging design requirements: week-long battery life, small size, high performance, and low cost. The single parameter that complicates the simultaneous fulfillment of all of these design goals is power consumption. To address these concerns, systems must be optimized for power during design and also at run-time. The key to taking advantage of the performance-power trade-off is the use of algorithms that aim to reduce the processor´s performance level when it is not critical to meet the application´s deadlines. The central issue is how the right level of performance can be predicted for applications. The intelligent energy management (IEM) framework provides an integrated solution for addressing power management of SoC devices: 1) EDA methodology for using soft-IP in multiple frequency- and voltage-domain designs; 2) open- and closed- loop control of the power supply for efficient operation; 3) architectural abstraction for controlling the processor´s performance levels; and 4) software algorithms for deriving the minimum sufficient performance for running dynamic workloads.