Software approaches for energy-efficient system design

Energy efficiency has become a critical issue in modern system design. Energy saving not only increases the operational time of battery-powered systems, but also decreases their heat dissipation. Recent embedded systems mostly include processors to meet the time-to-market constraint and increase the design flexibility. Such systems are structured as three layers. The hardware resides at the bottom layer, operating system layer is on top of it, and application program is the top layer. In these systems, hardware is the actual energy consumer, however software running on the processor controls its behavior and affects on the energy consumption. For this reason, this book focuses on the energy reduction techniques targeting software layers. First, it discusses two OS level energy reduction techniques called Dynamic Power Management (DPM) for interactive applications. Also, it addresses a low energy software optimization technique based on the program specialization for computation intensive applications. The author believes that the techniques presented in this book can be a small step to solve these problems for a large step in the future.