Temperature and Leakage Aware Power Control for Embedded Streaming Applications

Leakage power has an increasing relevance for recent and future embedded technologies. Moreover, its contribution is heavily dependent on runtime temperature and process variations, that strongly impact the effectiveness of energy management strategies. Furthermore, in the context of streaming embedded systems, aggressive shutdown techniques that are typically applied to reduce leakage contribution are not suitable because of their negative effect on throughput. In this work we propose a leakage-aware approach for streaming applications that: i) Exploits feedback control policy to guarantee throughput by observing output data rate; ii) Levarages runtime temperature information to adjust the control law so that leakage energy is minimized independently from process variations and temperature conditions. Results show how temperature and leakage variations impact energy management strategies and how the proposed approach is effective in reducing total power consumption.