Leakage-Aware Energy Minimization Using Dynamic Voltage Scaling and Cache Reconfiguration in Real-Time Systems

System optimization techniques are widely used to improve energy efficiency as well as overall performance. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is acknowledged to be successful in reducing processor energy consumption. Due to the increasing significance of the memory subsystem´s energy consumption, dynamic cache reconfiguration (DCR) techniques are recently proposed at the aim of saving cache subsystem´s energy consumption. As the manufacturing technology scales into the order of nanometers, leakage current, both in the processor and cache subsystem, becomes a significant contributor in the overall power dissipation. In this paper, we efficiently integrate processor voltage scaling and cache reconfiguration together that is aware of leakage power to minimize overall system energy consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing techniques by on average 12 - 23%.