Power-Aware Resource Management Techniques for Low-Power Embedded Systems

Energy consumption has become one of the most important design constraints for modern embedded systems, especially for mobile embedded systems that operate with a limited energy source such as batteries. For these systems, the design process is characterized by a trade-off between a need for high performance and low power consumption emphasizing high performance to meeting the performance constraints while minimizing the power consumption. Decreasing the power consumption not only helps with extending the battery lifetime in portable devices but is also a critical factor in lowering the packaging and the cooling costs of embedded systems. While better low-power circuit design techniques have helped to lower the power consumption [9,34,41], managing power dissipation at higher abstraction levels can considerably decrease energy requirements [3,14].