Task partitioning algorithm for intra-task dynamic voltage scaling

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is a very powerful technique in reducing dynamic power consumption of CMOS circuits. Recent studies showed that intra-task DVS method which adjusts the voltage level during program execution can achieve significant energy reduction. However, the overhead of large number of voltage switching becomes a limitation for its practical implementation. In this paper, we propose a novel task partitioning algorithm for intra-task DVS which partitions a given task so that the DVS can be applied more effectively with the minimum number of voltage switching. Experimental result using H.264 decoder software shows that the proposed algorithm reduces the energy consumption by up to 25% over the conventional method.