A low power scheduling scheme with resources operating at multiple voltages

This paper presents a new resource constrained and latency constrained scheduling scheme that minimizes power consumption for the case when the resources operate at multiple voltages. The scheduling scheme is list based. In each control cycle, the ready nodes are assigned depending on the number of available resources and the difference between the actual number of cycles left and an estimate of the number of cycles required to schedule the remaining nodes. The switching activity of the nodes as well as the priority (which is related to the capacitance) of the nodes is taken into account. We assume that the resources can be operated at 5 V, 3.3 V, 2.4 V and 1.5 V. Moreover, we assume that the resources (multipliers and adders) have different voltage-delay curves. Experiments with some HLS benchmark examples show that the proposed scheme achieves significant power reduction. For instance, when the latency constraint is 1.5 times the tight latency constraint, the average reduction is 59.1%