ABSTRACT
The development of integrated circuit (IC) industry has resulted in a chip density of over a million transistors per square millimeter, eventually leading to a performance increase by a factor of 1000 within next 10 years. To mitigate the urgent power crisis, numerous power management techniques have been developed, which monitor system conditions and optimize their parameters to minimize power dissipation levels. Power management can be performed at various levels of abstraction, and is classified as device-level, structural-level, and system-level power management. The most effective system-level power management technique is recognized as dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS). The chapter focuses on the research of DVFS-based cross-layer power management, from high-level system perspective, to low-level circuit and device implementation. Sliding mode controls were initially introduced to provide a robust control for variable structure systems. The basic principle behind sliding mode control is to design a sliding surface in control law, which will direct the trajectory of state variables toward a desired origin.
