Dynamic Voltage Scheduling for Real Time Asynchronous Systems

Abstract

Power consumption is becoming a major issue for embedded systems design. High power consumption reduces battery life and affects system cost and performances. This paper introduces a new power reduction technique that combines an asynchronous processor and a low power operating system (OS). The asynchronous processor is ideal for embedded applications: it is low power and functional within a wide supply voltage range. According to the tasks requirements, the OS regulates the processor operating voltage and so the computational power at run-time. This ensures minimum energy consumption. Simulation results show that low power OS - asynchronous processor combination reduce drastically power consumption in a real-time embedded system.