Quantifying and enhancing power awareness of VLSI systems
- 1 December 2001
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
- Vol. 9 (6) , 757-772
- https://doi.org/10.1109/92.974890
Abstract
An increasingly important figure-of-merit of a VLSI system is "power awareness," which is its ability to scale power consumption in response to changing operating conditions. These changes might be brought about by the time-varying nature of inputs, desired output quality, or just environmental conditions. Regardless of whether they were engineered for being power aware, systems display variations in power consumption as conditions change. This implies, by the definition above, that all systems are naturally power aware to some extent. However, one would expect that some systems are "more" power aware than others. Equivalently, we should be able to re-engineer systems to increase their power awareness. In this paper, we attempt to quantitatively define power awareness and how such awareness can be enhanced using a systematic technique. We illustrate this technique by applying it to VLSI systems at several levels of the system hierarchy - multipliers, register files, digital filters, dynamic voltage-scaled processors, and data-gathering wireless networks. It is seen that, as a result, the power awareness of these preceding systems can be significantly enhanced leading to increases in battery lifetimes in the range of 60-200%.Keywords
This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit:
- Energy efficient filtering using adaptive precision and variable voltagePublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2003
- A forward-mapping realization of the inverse discrete cosine transformPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2003
- A power metric for mobile systemsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Wireless sensor networksPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Dynamic voltage scaling techniques for distributed microsensor networksPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Wireless integrated network sensorsCommunications of the ACM, 2000
- A dynamic voltage scaled microprocessor systemPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2000
- Power scalable processing using distributed arithmeticPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1999
- The energy complexity of register filesPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1998
- Embedded power supply for low-power DSPIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, 1997