Temperature Minimization Using Power Redistribution in Embedded Systems

Due to rapidly increasing power densities in Integrated Circuits (ICs) and the resulting increases in on-chip temperatures, thermal management has become an important issue in embedded system design. This paper focuses on thermal aware scheduling of periodic real-time tasks in embedded systems. The paper exploits a concept called Total Thermal Impact of a periodic task set to develop some theoretical results on thermal aware scheduling. Based on these results, the paper presents a scheduling heuristic called Power Redistribution Algorithm (PRA). The heuristic interleaves tasks with different power consumption and processor idle times in such a way that all real-time task deadlines are met and system temperature is minimized. The heuristic has small runtime complexity but results in substantial temperature reduction.