Time-based power control architecture for application processors in smartphones

Proposed is an architecture for reducing the power consumption of an application processor (AP) in a smartphone. The proposed architecture is designed for sharing the main memory between the AP and modem blocks. A power-saving algorithm is proposed that focuses on random and sparse data patterns in connected and idle modes. The algorithm automatically performs power/clock gating without the intervention of the CPU, unlike dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. To control power gating, a power consumption model is formulated to solve an optimisation problem. The proposed algorithm is verified with electronic system level simulation based on actual scenarios of a mobile terminal. The results show an improvement in power consumption.