Microelectronics Engineering

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Browsing Microelectronics Engineering by Author "Alemu, Getachew(PhD)"

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    Leakage Aware Hardware Architecture and Dynamic Power Scheduling
    (Addis Ababa University, 2011-07) Dilbie, Daniel; Alemu, Getachew(PhD)
    In the last couple of decades, battery powered mobile devices such as smart phones have become one of the most prolific electronic devices in history. With this has come an exploding demand for performance and features that cover almost every aspect of our digital multimedia interconnected lives including 3-D gaming, still and video cameras, WAN, Bluetooth, highspeed data connections, and so on. As ever increasing features continue to be integrated into these products, there is an ongoing need to develop innovative ways to reduce power consumption and extend battery life. A core requirement of effective and efficient management of energy is a good understanding of where and how the energy is used: how much of the system’s energy is consumed by which parts of the system and under what circumstances. In this work, a Smartphone is developed, hereafter referred to as the XLP, from the ground up with modular architecture where each module is supplied through an active switch matrix which is memory mapped and updated periodically by the main applications processor in the system. The basic notion of this architecture is achieving zero-leakage power for modules which are not being used. This significantly reduces the idle power consumption which accounts for more than 60% of the average power consumed in smart phones. In addition to this novel approach on the hardware architecture, a stochastic dynamic power scheduling and on-demand power and clock gating policies are developed. A number of possible policies are presented and, under given conditions, one of them is proved to be optimal using the energy response time product (ERP) metrics. The XLP is compared with three commercial smart phones, Openmoko Freerunner, HTC Dream and Google’s Nexus One on similar tests and usage scenarios. The XLP and all these three devices use the ARM microprocessor and run the Linux kernel. The comparison is on performance and power consumption. The XLP is proved to have the lowest power consumption on competitive performance levels.