Asynchronous thermal-aware DVFS control

Embedded devices using highly integrated circuits must cope with conflicting constraints. They have become more sensitive to variabilities with technology scaling while requiring computational efficiency under even more limited energy storage. Power management techniques, mainly based on Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) algorithms, are hence of great interest. Also, temperature increase/decrease is directly related to the power consumption and platform characteristics highly depend on the temperature. As a result, temperature must be controlled, at least limited. In the present paper, asynchronous thermal-aware DVFS control techniques are discussed. The proposed strategies implement a chopped scheme on top of a robust DVFS approach in order to limit the temperature increase. The asynchronous paradigm comes from the original idea in triggering the periods of oscillation from the monitoring of the internal temperature of the chip.