Application-informed platform evaluation for commercial-off-the-shelf dynamic voltage scaling

As form-factor and lifetime constraints placed on mobile electronic devices grow more restrictive, techniques such as dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and duty cycling can provide critical energy reductions. This work presents a model-based analysis of worst-case DVS break-even time, and introduces an application-agnostic metric for rapid side-by-side comparison of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products being considered for DVS applications. This metric is intended to reduce time spent profiling multiple devices by enabling more informed processing platform selection earlier in the design cycle. To validate this modeling effort, a COTS platform is selected, prototyped, and evaluated for actual versus predicted break-even time.