Adaptive dynamic power management for hard real-time pipelined Multiprocessor Systems

Energy efficiency is a critical design concern for embedded systems. Dynamic power management (DPM) schemes in Multiprocessor System on Chips (MPSoCs) has been wildly used to explore the idleness of processors and dynamically reduce the energy consumption by putting idle processors to low-power states. In this paper, we explore how to effectively apply dynamic power management in adaptive manner to reduce leakage power consumption for coarse-grained pipelined systems under hard real-time requirements. At each adaptive point, a system transformation is proposed to model the pipeline system with unfinished events as multi-stream system. By using extended pay-burst-only-once principle, the service curves for corresponding stream can be computed as a constraint for a minimal resource demand and energy minimization problem can be formulated with respect to the resource demands at each adaptive point. One light-weight heuristic, called balance workload scheme (BWS), is proposed in this paper to solve the minimization problem. Simulation results using real-life applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.