Low-Energy Intra-Task Voltage Scheduling using Static Timing Analysis

Since energy consumption of CMOS circuits has a quadratic dependency on the supply voltage, lowering the supply voltage is the most effective way of reducing energy consumption. We propose an intra-task voltage scheduling algorithm for low-energy hard real-time applications. Based on a static timing analysis technique, the proposed algorithm controls the supply voltage within an individual task boundary. By fully exploiting all the slack times, as scheduled program by the proposed algorithm always complete its execution near the deadline, thus achieving a high energy reduction ratio. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we built a software tool that automatically converts a DVS-unaware program into an equivalent low-energy program. Experimental results show that the low-energy version of an MPEG-4 encoder/decoder (converted by the software tool) consumes less than 7~25% of the original program running on a fixed-voltage system with a power-down mode.