Configurable On-Line Global Energy Optimization in Multi-Core Embedded Systems Using Principles of Analog Computation

This work presents the design of an on-line energy optimizer unit, which is capable of dynamically adjusting power supply voltages and operating frequencies of multiple processing elements (PE), tailored to the instantaneous workload information and is fully adaptive to variations in process and temperature. The circuit design borrows some of the basic principles of analog computation to continuously optimize the system-wide energy dissipation of multiple cores. The analogy between the energy minimization problem under timing constraints in a general task graph and the power minimization problem under Kirchhoffs current law (KCL) constraints in an equivalent resistive network is exploited